
Qass_ 
Book. 



^.fijuuv- , U>*SlSLj-o-rTT>j S J ^ ■ 



siKiLEGTioisrs Fi^ons^ 



THE 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 



O F 

THE NE\V AVEST, 

CONTAINING 

FULLY AUTHEN riCATEnf^ INFORMATION OF THE AGRICULTURAL, MERCANTILE, 

COMMERCIAL, MANUFACTURING, MINING AND GRAZING INDUSTRIES, 

AND REPRESENTING THE CHARACTER, DEVELOPMENT, 

RESOURCES AND PRESENT CONDITION 

O F 

TEXAS, ARKANSAS, COLORADO, NEW MEXICO 
AND INDIAN TERRITORY. 

ALSO, 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THEIR REPRESENTATIVE MEN AND WOMEN. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH FINE STEEL-PLATE PORTRAITS. 



h 



MARSHALL, TEXAS. 
THE UNITED STATES BIOGRAPHICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, 

HODGE AND JENNINGS BROS., PROPRIETORS. 

18 8 1. 



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s-^i'i I 



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to 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



49 



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time since peace was established. His hand and 
purse are ahvavs open to worthy charities, and he 
gives cheerfully and liberally of his means to all pub- 
lic enterprises. Naturally modest and retiring in his 
disposition, when not occupied in l)usiness he jirefers 
to enjoy the privacy of his comfortable and beautiful 
home and the society of his interesting family. He 
has never held a membership in any church, but with 
his wife is an attendant upon the Prc-sbyterian, and 
contributes to its sujjport. '{"h.-ir pa-ents on both 
sides were Presbyterian in belief, and this is conse- 



quendy the church of their ch6ice, their children being 
always idenrified with the Sabbath school. Like his 
early ancestor, the famous Scottish " Wallace of Ellers- 
lie," who lived nearly a thousand years ago, he is tall 
and handsome, weighing one hundred and twenty-five 
jjounds. His eyes are dark gray and his hair black, 
though now thickly silvered with gray. 

With a strong constitution, a firm will, temperate 
habits, good health and a cheerful temperament, he 
bids fair to be spared for many years of business, use- 
fulness and happiness in the city where his lot is cast. 



LEONARDO GARZA. 



SAN ANTONIO. 



LKONARDO ('..\RZA was born in San Antonio, 
> Texas, .\ugust 5, 1844. Un the maternal side 
Mr. Garza is descended from the pioneer European 
family of San Antonio, he being a direct descendant 
of Maria Robama de Pelancur, the founder of the 
city. She was a native of the Canary Isles, and 
was treated with great distinction by the viceroy of 
Mexico, Juan de Acuna, Marquis de Casa-Fuerte, on 
her arrival on the .\mencan continent, on account of 
ner distinguished lineage, she being a direct descend- 
ant of the renowned navigator, the Norman Baron 
Jean de Bethencourt, who conijuered the Canary 
Isles in the year 1402. The present sijelling of the 
name "Betaiicur," was adopted by the Baron's nephew, 
to accord to the Spanish tongue. On his paternal 
side, Mr. Carza traces his ancestors back to Brescia, 
in Lombardy, and an important river in that province 
was named in honor of the family. Some of the fam- 
ily went to Spain with (lonsalvo de Cordova, known 
as the Great Captain, after the end of the great bat- 
tles in Italy, and from thence came to that portion of 
Me.xico known as the New Philippines, or Las Te.xas, 
so named from an old Indian tiibe. Geromino de la 
Garza, his great-grandfather, came in the company of 
the thirteen families that settled San Antonio, and of 
wiiom "La Pobladora" de Betancur was the head. 
La Pobladora means original settler. The old home- 
stead, partly built by him is still owned by the present 
Mr. Garza, and until recently occupied i)y him as his 
place of residence. The old building is famous in 
Te.xas history, and was the first building taken by the 
.\merican forces in the storming of Bexar. It is as 
strong as a fortress and will last for centuries yet. In 
this building was born Jose .Vntonio de la Garza, the 
father of the subject of this sketch, in the year 1777, 
and here he died in April, 1851. 

He was a man of great influence in the county of 
Bexar, and was looked up to by the majority of the old 
settlers, by both the Sijanish and .\nglo-.\mericans. 
He was a man of considerable wealth, and gave 
employment to many persons. He was especially 
remarkable for his charities, and it was a common 
saying during his lifetime and after his death, " as 

7-T 



charitable as old man Ciarza," or " tio Flacco," "Uncle 
Flacco," as he was familiarly called. In 1878 the 
legislature of Texas saw- fit, in honor to his memory 
and to his family, to name one of the new counties 
for him. This was a merited compliment, for he did 
a great deal for the prosperity of San Antonio, for the 
county of Bexar, and for the great state of Texas. 

Maria Josefa Menchaca, his wife, and mother of 
Leonardo Garza, was born in San Antonio, in 1805, 
in a house situated on the east side of Main Plaza and 
built by "La Pobladora" de Betancur, her great-great- 
grandmother. She was married at the early age of 
sixteen, and had many sons and daughters, of whom 
only one son is living and three daughters, the mother 
superior of the Ursuline Convent of San Antonio 
being one of them. She was a woman of remarkable 
strength of character and possessed an indomitable 
will. Left, while yet young, a widow with eight young 
children, she managed to educate them all, and at her 
death,, which took place September 19, 1879, she left 
a competency for life for each and every one of her 
surviving children. She was well known in San Anto- 
nio and\uiiversally deplored, especially by the poor 
and needy, for she never turned a deaf ear to the call 
for charity. She was in word and deed a good mother 
and a worthy descendant of her illustrious maiernal 
ancestor, Maria Robaina de Betancur. 

Leonardo Garza was born in San Antonio, .\ugu;^ 
5, 1844. He remained in San Antonio up to his tenth 
year, when he was sent to Falmouth, Massachusetts, a 
town on Cape Cod, at that time quite unknown to 
fame, but lately become a famous watering place. 
Here is an old institution of learning known as Law- 
rence Academy, and here, after a five years" prepara- 
tory course, Mr. Garza graduated ami then entered 
Williams College, in Williamstown, Berkshire county, 
Massachusetts, in the class of 1864, but on account 
of the war between the North and South, Mr. Garza 
did not graduate until 1865. During the whole ci\ il 
war Mr. Garza did not receive news or letters from his 
relatives in Texas, and was obliged to get along the 
best way he could. /Vt one time we find him in Phila- 
delphia as teacher in St. Mark's Episcopal .Academy. 



5° 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST- 



where he had under his charge the sons of the best 
families in Philadelphia, such as the McMichaels, Bid- 
dies, Pattersons, Godeys, Bishop Potter's son. Rusks, 
etc. ; then again we find him in New York city can- 
vassing for the great city directory, known as Trow' s 
City Directory, but compiled at that time (1864) by 
Henry Wilson, in Greene street. Mr. Garza was 
employed by Mr. Wilson on Wilson' s Business and 
Copartnership Directory. This was a lucrative posi- 
tion for Mr. Ciarza, but not being a permanent one, he 
left it to accept a ])osition in the medical department 
of the United States navy, on board the double-ender 
" Patuxet." He remained in the service about five 
months, and resigned in February, 1865, re-entered 
college immediately, and graduated in the class of 
1865. In November of the same year Mr. Garza 
returned to his native home in San Antonio, and was 
welcomed by his mother and relatives as one returned, 
as it were, from the dead, after an absence of eleven 
years from his native place. 

During these years Mr. Garza enjoyed good health, 
and was kindly treated by the Northern people, for 
whom, during his long intercourse with them, he formed 
a strong attachment. For him there is no North, no 
South — but one country, now and fore\er. 

In the year of the great exposition in Paris, 1867, 
Mr. Garza made a trip to Europe and remained away 
one year. While in Europe he saw many things to 
admire and which he deemed worthy of imitation in 
this country, but nevertheless, on the whole, he was 
inclined to say : " (iive me my native country in pre- 
ference to all others." As between France, England 
and Germany, he preferred France, and is well sat- 
isfied in his own mind that the French people 
are the most prosperous and happy of all Europeans. 
Some six months after his return from abroad, that 



is, in June, 1868, he was married to Miss Caroline 
Callaghan, daughter of the late Bryan Callaghan and 
C. Ramon de Callaghan. 

Mr. Callaghan was born in the city of Cork, Ireland, 
and was a gentleman highly esteemed in San Antonio, 
and one of the most influential that ever lived in Hexar. 
While mayor of San Antonio, he did a great deal for 
the improvement of the city, and his administration is 
praised even to this day. Mr. Callaghan died in 1854. 
at the early age of forty-two, being at that time the 
most prosperous merchant and wealthiest man in the 
city. He died beloved by all and was universally 
mourned. 

His wife. Miss C. Ramon, is a native of San Anto- 
nio, and a descendent of the first families that settled 
the place. She is still living, and resides in the city. 
Mrs. Caroline C. Garza was born in San Antonio in 
June, 1850, was married June, 1868. Her first child, 
Josephine, was born in July, 1870; Leonard born in 
October, 1872; Francis, born in February, 1874, and 
died in September, 1874; Bryan, born in December, 
1875 ; Rudolph, bom in April, 1878. 

Both Mr. Garza and his wife are Catholics. He is a 
Democrat in [)olitics. He never held office ; belongs 
to no society of any kind; is now engaged in the real 
estate business and is president of the Occidental 
Land Company, a corjjoration duly chartered under 
the laws of Texas " for the purpose of preparing and 
keeping a perfect and complete abstract of all the land 
titles in Be.xar county and other counties of western 
Texas — to furnish chains of title to any lands in Bexar 
and other counties of western Texas to such persons 
as may apply for them — to buy and sell lands for the 
benefit of the company, or for other persons on com- 
mission — to pay taxes for residents or non-residents, 
and to do a general real estate business." 



HERMANN MARWITZ. 



GAI.l'F.STON. 



ARRIVING in Galveston, Texas, in 185 1, with 
^ fifty dollars in his pocket; in i860 beginning 
business as a retail grocer with a capital of $1000, 
Mr. Marwitz is now senior member in the firm of H. 
Marwitz & Co., wholesale and retail grocers and ship- 
chandlers, corner of Mechanic and Twenth-third 
streets, in which he has $40,000 invested, the annual 
sales amounting to $120,000. The junior partner is 
Mr. F. W. Mitler, who was his clerk from 1868 to 
1876, when he became a partner with one-half interest 
in the business 

As further evidence of his prosperity, Mr. Marwitz 
owns a residence which cost him $15,000, five 
improved places, and several unimproved lots in the 
city. How did he make his fortune ? He answers : 
"By doing whatever I could find to do, until by hard 
licks and economy I had made enough to go into 
trade" — a field open to all in this land. 



Mr. Marwitz was born in Magdeliurg, Prussia, .Sep- 
tember 30, 1831. His father, Mr. G. Marwitz, was a 
manufacturer of crockery, who died in 1848. Most 
of his relatives still reside in Europe, engaged in 
various industrial pursuits. "His mother, Mrs. Louise 
Marwitz, died in Galveston at the age of seventy-eight. 
She was the daughter of Mr. Patte, a descendant of 
the French Huguenots who fled from persecution in 
1685. 

Mr. Marwitz had a fair common school education at 
Magdeburg. After leaving school, he served five years 
as an ajjprentice to the grocer's business, and then, as 
said before, he came to Galveston in 1851, when its 
population was from five to six thousand. He had 
the good fortune to marry, in 1859, Miss Bertha Plitt, 
born in Hessen, Germany, July 9, 1840, daughter of 
George Plitt, w'ho died in two weeks after his arrival, 
leaving a wife and five children. Bertha was the 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



5' 



youngest of thu live. Mr. and Mrs. Marwitz have hut 
one child, Ida Mary, born in Gaheston, January lo, 
1864, and educated at the UrsuHne Convent, Oahes- 
ton. Mr. Marwitz, in 1861, when the war began, 
enhsted in the Galveston Sappers and Miners, an 
engineer corps in which he continued until 1864, and 
(he says) as he only handled whecll)arrows, he never 
killed a man on either side. 

Mr. Marwitz belongs to the Lutheran chun h. In 
politics he is independent. He is a member of the 



German society for the jjurpose of building up Ger- 
man schools, and churches and assisting emigrants to 
get a start in business on these hospitable shores. He 
is a member of the Garten Verein and Casino, both 
(ierman societies formed for amusement aft.r working 
hours. The former is a very select and aristocratic 
society. Its garden is hardly excelled by the parks of 
San Antonio. Mr. Marwitz is in person the true type 
of the German, and has the air of a successful busi- 
ness gentleman. 



AUGUSTUS C. ALLEN. 



HOUSTON. 



THIS gentleman, well known in the earlier days 
of Texas, was born at Saratoga, New York, on 
the 4th day of July, 1806. He grew up and was 
educated in Oneida county, and for some time after- 
wards was professor of mathematics in the Polytech- 
nic Institute at Chatenango. From there he went to 
New York City and become interested for several 
years in a banking house. He subsec|uently followed 
merchandising in Baldwinville, New York, until he 
movalto Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1833. At Baldwin- 
ville, on the 3d of May, 1831, he married Charlotte 
M., daughter of Dr. Jonas C. Baldwin, the founder of 
that town. She was born in Onandaga county, on 
the 14th of July, 1805, nearly a year prior to the birth 
of her husband, and came with him to Texas in 1833. 
Mr. Allen removed from Nacogdoches, in company 
with his brother. John K., soon after the battle of San 
Jacinto, to Buffalo bayou, where they bought and set- 
tled on the land upon which the city of Houston stands. 
Under the firm name of A. C. & J. K. Allen, they 
laid out a town s'te, on a liberal scale, and made propo- 
sitions to the first congress of Texas, assembled at 
Columbia, in October, 1836, for the location of the 
seat of government at that place, to be called Hous- 
ton, in honor of the newly inaugurated president. 
Their proposals were accepted and, early in 1837, the 
government was removed there. They built, of their 
own means, the first capiiol of the republic, as a 
donation ; which, however, reverted to them on the 
removal of the seat of government from Houston to 
Austin, in 1830. They donated lots for churches, 
schools, etc., and in every way manifested a hberal 
spirit in building up the town. They were known all 
over Texas as men of energy and enterprise, com- 
bined with business sagacity and liberal views. The 
fine city of to-day is a monument to their early con- 
ceptions. Their brothers, Samuel and Harvey H. 
Allen, also became well-known citizens of Houston. 
A. C. Allen, was also a share-holder in the stock of 
the Galveston City Company ; a large operator in 
lands, with handsome profits, and in .various ways con- 
nected with enterprises to build up the country. 
Though never otticially connected with them, he was 
an early friend and contributor to the infantile railroad 



enterprises projected from Houston as the initial point. 
Mr. .-Xllen and Mosley Baker were the originators of 
the Houston and Texas Central railway. 

About the year 1852 he was appointed United 
States Consul at the Mexican ports of Minatillan, on 
the Gulf, and Tahuantepec on the Pacific, the termini 
of an isthmus route, then engaging the public mind 
and now (1881) almost a perfected fact. He remained 
there about ten years, and, with Mr. Welsh, an Eng- 
lishman, established a trade from Minatillan to Europe, 
through a line of sail vessels ; shipping largely and 
profitably vanilla, cochineal, dye-woods and mahogony. 
After the war between the states began, Mr. Allen, 
repaired to New York, to settle his accounts with the 
government, resign his office, make that city his tuture 
home and engage in banking. His health, however, 
had been declining for two or three years, causing him 
to travel extensively in the West Indies and elsewhere. 
His wife was in Texas and he sent for her to join him 
in New York. She could only do so by going to 
Matamoros, on account of the blockade, and a httle 
before she reached him, he breathed his last. She 
arrived in time, however, to see his remains deposited 
in the beautiful cemetery of Greenwood, Brooklyn, in 
the soil of his native state, after an absence of thirty 
years. 

Mr; Allen was a small man, full of energy, directed 
by a clear head, and possessed those qualities which 
win and hold friends. He was an especial friend of 
General Houston and had kindly relations with most 
of the public men of Texas. 

Mrs. Allen, yet residing in Houston, at the age of 
seventy-six, justly ranks as one of the mothers of 
Texas ; having come in her early womanhood, before 
the revolution of 1835, and remained its steadfast 
friend for forty-eight years. Endowed with those traits 
which adorn womankind, blessed with an early educa- 
tion, from her first location in Nacogdoches to her pala- 
tial home of to-day. she has been endeared to her 
people as one altogether deserving their love and 
respect. Very fitly she may be styled the mother of the 
city of Houston, with twenty thousand people, railroads, 
steam-boats, factories and mansions, for she has 
nursed it, watched it and been of it from its first log 



52 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



kut to its present position. Honored be the memory 
of such a mother. 

Mr. and Mrs. Allen had four children, three of whom 
died in infancy or childhood. The only survivor is 
their daughter, Martha E. W., the wife of Mr. James 
Converse, civil engineer, to whom she was married on 
the 2ist of September, 1873. She is an accomplished 
and estimable lady, and has only one child, Thomas 
Pierce Converse, born July 11, 1876. These two 
are the only living offspring of A. C. Allen. 



Mr. Converse was born in Aurora, Ohio, on the 21st 
of .September, 1828, and received a liberal education, 
iucluding civil engineering. He has been identified 
with the interests of Houston for many years and with 
the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio railway, 
almost from its inception, and is now its general super- 
intendent. He has energy, intelligence and integrity, 
and has been a valuable factor in the jirogress of 
that great work, still wending its way, as its pet name 
indicates, towards the "sun-set." 



JUDGE NAT. M. BURFORD. 



DALLAS. 



NAT. M. BURFORD was born in Smith county, 
'I'ennessee, on the 24th day of June, (St. John's 
day,) 1824. His father was John Hawkins Hurford, 
a native of North Carolina, of English descent. His 
mother was Nancy McAlister. a Virginia girl of Welsh 
extraction. His grandfathers, on both sides, were 
Revolutionary soldiers. His father was a soldier under 
(leneral Andrew Jackson in the war of 1812-15, but 
after that he led the quiet life of an independent 
farmer in Smith county, 'I'ennessee, where his chil- 
dren were born and reared. \\t died at the age of sev- 
enty-five, and his wife at the age of eighty. They 
were highly respected in all the surrounding country, 
and were among those old Tennessee fiimilies person- 
ally known to and loved by General Jackson. Of 
their children only five are living — three daughters and 
two sons. The daughters are the mothers of families 
and still reside in Tennessee. WilUam G., one of the 
sons, was a soldier in the Mexican war and wounded 
at the battle of Cerro (iordo. He was also a major 
and a gallant soldier in the Confederate army. Never 
having married, he lives a ([uiet life in Tarrant cduntv, 
Texas. 

Nathaniel Macon Burford, the subject of this sketch, 
named in honor of the greatest statesman North Car- 
olina ever jiroduced, and as pure and patriotic a man 
as ever sat in the councils of the New World, was 
denied the advantages of collegiate education, his 
father being unable to furnish the same, but at the 
age of seventeen, by teaching country schools, he was 
enabled to pass through a course of study at Irving 
College, in which trying process he passed three years. 
He then studied law in the office of the Hon. A. J. 
Marchbanks, in McMinnville, Tennessee, and was 
licensed as a lawyer by his preceptor, then on the 
bench, and Chancellor Broom field Ridley, in October, 
1845. For a time he located at Jasper, in East Ten- 
nessee, and had fine jjrospects of success, but he soon 
became restless and desirous of adventure in new 
fields. He volunteered as a soldier for the Mexican 
war, but when his com])any reached Knoxville, the 
(juota of the state had been filled. The services of 
the com|)any were declined, but young Burford, desi- 
rous of serving the cause, presented his horse, a noble 



animal, to Dr. John T. Reed, a surgeon in a regiment 
already mustered in. For a moment he returned to 
Jasper, but in December, 1846, started for the great 
Southwest. 

Short of funds, he worked his way, as a deck pas- 
senger, to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he arrived 
with an actual and live capital of two dollars and fifty 
cents. He walked on foot to Jefferson, 'I'exas, where 
he at once obtained the position of dejiuty clerk of 
the district court under W'illis H. Childress, as noble 
a man as ever hailed from North Alabama. The bar 
was too full to encourage his aspirations, and after a 
considerable service, replenished in purse, he rode 
into the hamlet of Dallas on the ist day of October, 
1848, astride of a twenty-five dollar pony, his own 
property, with five dollars in his pocket, and numerous 
letters of recommendation to several of the twelve 
adult males then composing its sovereignty. He filed 
his homestead claim on the town, by posting his 
shingle as a lawyer, speedily formed a law partnershi]) 
with John H. Reagan, whose name is now national, 
and rapidly grew in practice. A thorough, but most 
liberal and generous Democrat, he soon became a 
favorite in this then Democratic community. In 1850, 
and again in 1852, he was elected prosecuting attor- 
ney of the district in which Dallas was, covering an 
immense territory. He won great popular favor as a 
faithful and successful prosecutor, but utterly refused 
to lend countenance to malicious or vindictive actions, 
trampling them under foot as vile and detestable, and 
thus elevated, in public esteem, the Judiciary of the 
state. 

By a law of 1856, the sixteenth judicial district was 
created, embracing the counties of Ellis, Dallas, Col- 
lin, Grayson, and all the counties and territory west of 
them. He was elected judge of this new district. 
He, therefore, held the first court in several counties 
of the w^est, as Johnson, Parker, Palo Pinto, Wise, 
Young, Jack, Ckiy, etc. 

When the war came in the spring of 1861, he 
enlisted as a private in the ist 'I'exas artillery com 
pany, commanded by his townsman, John J. (lood. 
He served in this battery till the winter of 186 1-2; 
but in that time his commanding uflicer, General Ben 





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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



53 



McCulloch, who knew his wurih, went to Riihiiiond, 
and he, in conjunction with John H. Reagan, then 
postmaster-general of the Confederate States, and a 
former partner of Judge Burford, secured for him a 
commission to raise a regiment. The regiment was 
speedily raised, in the spring of 1862, and mustered 
into the Confederate service as the 19th Te.xas cav- 
alry. But, though holding a commission as its colo- 
nel, he refused to serve until the same was ratified by 
a vote of the regiment, which was done unanimously. 

The entire service of the regiment was confined to 
the Trans-Mississippi department in Arkansas, F^ouisi- 
ana and Texas. Among the engagements in which it 
participated, while under command of Colonel Bur- 
ford, were the battles of Mansfield, l^jlair's J.anding, 
and Monett's Ferry. He was almost in touching dis- 
tance of the noble and fearless Ceneral Tom (^reen, 
when he was killed at Blair's Landing. 

Prompted by ill-health, he resigned his commission 
in September, 1864, and returned home. 

Li 1866, under President Johnson's reconstruction 
prcjclamation, he was elected to the legislature from 
I )allas county, and by the house of representatives, 
when assembled, he was elected speaker. 

hi A|_iril, 1875, he was elected presiding justice of 
Dallas county, and in February, 1876, (under the new 
constitution,) was elected judge of the eleventii judi- 
cial district, coni])osed of the jiopulous counties of 
Dallas and Ellis. In July, 1877, against the protest 
of many friends, he resigned this jjosition. On the 
creation of north Texas, in 1879, as a distinct dis- 
trict of the United States judicial system, though an 
unchanged Democrat, he was aiJpointed a United 
States commissioner, resident in Dallas, whiili position 
he now holds, honorably and acceptably. 

On the 18th of January, 1854, Judge llurford mar- 
ried Mary J., daughter of ( ). B. Riiight, a [.ioiieer of 



Dallas county. With this excellent and universally 
esteemed lady, his married life has been singularly 
blessed in domestic felicity. Of eight children, five 
still survive under the parental roof, viz : Mattie, a 
very lovely young woman, (this by the editor, 
who knows her well and tenderly esteems her,) 
born February 16, 1861; Nathaniel M. jr., born August 
20, 1866; Robert Lee, born in 1870; Jeff. Mallard, 
born in 1876, and Mary J., born in September, 1879. 
Mrs. Burford is one of those rare women, reared in 
the wilderness, to whom chivalry and manhood bow, 
whether in the hut or the palace, and hence she is a 
pet with all the old pioneers of Dallas county, who 
have known her as child, girl, woman, mother and 
wife. The compiler of this rude sketch of the hus- 
band would be derelict to his sense of manhood not to 
pay this tribute to so pure and so good a woman as 
Mary Knight Burford. It is a sincere tribute to mer- 
itorious worth. 

Mrs. Burford is a Southern Methodist, while the 
Judge is an Episcopalian — neither tainted with that 
clanish bigotry which so often mars otherwise loveable 
characters. 

Judge Burford is yet but in the full tide of man- 
hood—only fifty-six years of age — and may yet do 
good ser\ice to his country. He is an afQible, genial 
man, generous to his own detriment — a fine conversa- 
tionalist, fond of polite and biograjjhic literature, and 
though not a ])oet, has much of poetry in his nature. 
He exemplifies, strikingly, a quaint saying of the 
Southwest, embodying the superlative idea of nobility 
in nature, in the expression, " He has a heart as big 
as a mountain !" He is a type of early men in north 
Texas, steadily passing away, whose individual labors 
are doomed to oblivion, but whose aggregate will be 
immortalized in the ultimate grandeur of this [teerless 
rcLrion of the Southwest. 



JUDGE CHARLES LANDER CLEVELAND. 



GALVESTON. 



CHARLES L. CLEVELAND was born in 15reck- 
enridge county, Kentucky, August 25, 1824. 
He is the son of Jesse A. H.. Cleveland, who was 
born in Virginia, moved with his father to Kentucky, | 
married Sarah Lander in Fayette county, was a farmer, j 
a man of first-rate English education, a superior 
mathematician, in early life engaged in surveying in 
Kentucky, and moved from that state to Memphis, 
Tennessee, in 1831 ; in 1833 moved to Brazoria 
county, Texas, when his wife died, the first victim of 
cholera in that state; followed merchandising in Bra- 
zoria two years, settled on a farm near Barnard river in 
1835, was a soldier under (ieneral Houston in 1836, 
moved to Galveston in 1841, having a considerable j 
fortune, consisting ])rinci])ally of slaves; was deputy 
United States marshal under Oeneral P)en McCul- 
locli during the latter's term, and had entire control 



fflf the office. In 1844 Jesse A. H. Cleveland, without 
pretending to any knowledge of the theory or practice 
of medicine, while the yellow fever was raging in Gal- 
veston, undertook the cure of that disease and was 
wonderfully successful, insomuch that he continued to 
treat patients afflicted with the disease for years 
afterward. He probably tnet with better success than 
any man in the South. The method of cure, without 
medicine, was published in the papers and periodicals, 
and proved to be more successful than any other 
mode of treatment ever adopted. He treated more 
than five hundred cases. His diagnosis and treat- 
ment were unfailing, and his method is known as the 
"Cleveland Treatment.'" Thousands in Clalveston 
well remember Jesse A. H. Cleveland in connection 
w^ith yellow fever, as he attended them night and day 
when afflicted with the plague. He was a man oi 



54 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OE THE NEW WEST. 



great firmness and decision of character, and noted 
for his boundless generosity and hospitaHty. He 
died in Galveston in 1876. 

Jesse Cleveland, the paternal grandfather of Charles 
L. Cleveland, was born at Mount Vernon, Virginia, 
was a man of strongly-marked personal character- 
istics, and died in extreme old age, at Galesburg, 
Illinois. His mother, Sarah Lander, was a native of 
Fayette county, Kentucky, and died at Brazoria, 
Texas, in 1833. 

Charles L. Cleveland was a farmer's boy till the 
age of thirteen, when he entered the office of the 
Texas Republican , in Brazoria, Texas, which was 
worked on the first press ever introduced into Texas. 
It was known as die "war organ." While engaged 
on this paper Colonel Will'am H. Jack, wlio is known 
in Texas history, was a contributor. Mr. Cleveland 
became well acquainted uith him, and says of him 
that he was a most persuasive, silver-tongued, mag- 
netic orator, a lawyer who stood in the front rank of 
the Te.xas bar, a speaker who carried a jury, court, or 
crowd with equal facility; the author of the Turtle 
bayou resolutions that bear tlie same relation to the 
Texas declaration of independence that the Mecklen- 
burg resolutions bear to the Colonial Declaration of 
Independence. They were written on Turtle bayou 
with a pen made from a cane cut from its banks. 

Mr. Cleveland also worked in the office of the Tele- 
graph, a paper published at Columbia, on the Brazos, 
then the seat of government of the republic of 
Texas. Having worked several months in that office, 
he entered Rutersville C^ollege in Fayette county, 
from which institution he graduated with the degree 
of master of arts in 1842. The same year he went 
to Cialveston, whither his father had moved in 1841 
from Brazoria, and began the study of law, his pre- 
ceptor being Judge Benjamin C. Franklin. He was 
admitted to the bar at Liberty in 1846. He remained 
at Liberty, and for twenty-five years devoted himself 
to the practice of his profession there. That he nrfet ' 
with encouragement and pecuniary as well as profes- 
sional success, may readily be inferred when it is 
stated that he began his career without means, having, 
only his profession and an honorable ambition, and 
that he is now the owner of a large and valuable 
property. In June, 187 1, he formed a partnership 
with Judge Willie, of Galveston, to which city he 
removed, and where he now resides. I'he business of 
the firm is very extensive, and no lawyers rank 
higher than they at the Galveston l)ar. 

From Liberty county Mr. Cleveland was elected to 
serve in the sixth legislature of Texas, and served 
one term, Governor Pease being then the chief execu- 
tive of the state. Major John Henry Brown charac- 
terizes his career in the legislature as especially useful 
in checking hasty, inconsiderate and injudicious 
action, and more distinguished for preventing bad 
legislation than for the introduction of original 
measures. August, i860, he was elected Judge of the 
first judicial district of Texas, and this position he 
held until removed by Provisional Governor Hamil- 
ton, in 1865. No civil officers of the state were 



allowed to remain in office unless they would take 
and subscribe to the iron-clad oath. Those refusing 
to submit to this test of loyalty were regarded as 
imjiediments to reconstruction, and were accordingly 
removed. In 1S61, while he was judge, he was 
elected a delegate to the secession convention from 
Liberty and Polk counties. The convention assem- 
bled in January, 1861. Judge Cleveland advocated 
and voted for the ordinance of secession, urging its 
submission to the people, by whom it was subse- 
(|uently ratified by a vote of four to one. This 
important statement of a historical fact will correct 
the im])ression that the convention favored the adop- 
tion of the ordinance of secession, and the withdrawal 
of the state from the Union without the concurrence of 
the people as expressed at the ballot-box. Judge 
('leveland supported secession and the war with all 
his influence and energy. He was a delegate to the 
Democratic state con\'ention in 1857 from Liberty 
county, and in 1873 and 1876 from Galveston. 

Charles L. Cleveland and Mrs. Mary .\im Booker 
were married April g, 1849, in Liberty county, Texas. 
She is the daughter of Benjamin Watson Hardin, one 
of the pioneers of Texas, from Maury county, Ten- 
nessee. She was born January 5, 1829, in Liberty 
county, 'i'exas, and was educated in Galveston. Her 
fixther ami his three brothers, William, Augustine 
Blackburn and Franklin Hardin moved to Texas in 
1828. William was primary judge of the jurisdiction 
of Liberty, department of Nacogdoches, from 1833 to 
1836; was one of the eleven founders and original 
proprietors of the league of land upon which the city 
of Galveston was established, was associated with M. 
B. Menard in the organization of the Galveston 
City Company, and died in Galveston in 1838. 
Aueustine Blackburn Hardin was a member of the 
"Consultation," which convened at San Felipe in 
1835, and established a provisional government for 
Texas before its final separation from Mexico; was a 
soldier of the Texas revolution, and a member of the 
company commanded by his brother Franklin, and 
died in Liberty in 187 1. Franklin Hardin was the 
first surveyor of the Liberty land district, entered the 
army in 1836 as a lieutenant in Captain Logan's 
company, and participated in the battle of San 
Jacinto; in the fall of 1836 organized and com- 
manded a company in the army under General Rusk, 
and continued in the service until the close of the 
revolution ; was elected to the state legislature in 
1858 from Liberty county; died April 20, 1859, and 
was buried on the anniversary of the battle of San 
Jacinto, of which he was one of the heroes. Benjail'iin 
"W. Hardin, father of Mrs. Cleveland, was a memver 
of the Ayuntieiiiento of the Jurisdiction of Liberty, 
under the government of Mexico, and subsequently 
under the republic of Texas ; held the office of sherift 
several terms — a resolute man of great personal 
courage and unquestionable integrity, distinguished 
for hospitality, kindness and benevolence. He died 
in Liberty county, January 2, 1849. 

From the marriage of Judge Cleveland and his 
wife nine children have been born: Watson H. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST, 



55 



born March i6, 1850, ditd Jul}- iS. 1867; Stewart, 
l)orn September 24, 1852, died March 17, 1854; John 
Stewart, born December 18, 1854; Lander, born 
March 17. 1857; Oliver, born December 16, 1859; 
Sarah, bom November 26, 1862, died July 12, 1864; 
Charles Sidney, born September 16, 1865; Jesse W., 
born March 31, 1869 ; Willie F., born March 3, 1872. 

Judge Cleveland and his wife are both members of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church South, but their 
children who belong to any religious society are 
members of the Baptist church. Judge Cleveland 
adheres to the Methodist tenets because of the broad 
and liberal grounds they occujjy, while he accepts 
orthodox Christianity in every guise, and looks more 
to the life of the individual than to the particular 
creed or theory of church government he may espouse. 
His political principles are characteristically Demo- 
cratic. Judge Cleveland became a Mason in 1848, 
in Liberty Lodge No. 48, and was master of that lodge 
for sixteen years. He has also taken the Royal Arch 
degrees. He was deputy district grand master for 
the first judicial district for several years. 

Judge Cleveland's possessions are extensive. On 
the corner of Church and Tw\^lfth streets, Calveston, 
he owns a residence valued at $4,000. 'l"wo other 
dwelling houses in the city belonging to him are 
worth $6,000. Besides these possessions, he has in 
fee simple 50,000 acres of land, unimproved, in Bas- 
trop, Bexar, Blanco, Bosque, Brown, Burnet, Calla- 
han, Chambers, Clay, Coleman, Cumandie, Denton, 



Hardin, Jefferson, Karnes, Liberty, Montgomery, 
Polk, San Jacinto, Taylor, Travis, Tyler and \\'illiam- 
son counties. He is a director of the Texas Banking 
and Insurance Company, and also a stockholder. He 
is a stockholder in the Gulf Loan and Homestead 
Companv, the Southern Cotton Compress Company, 
the Texas Cotton Press and Manufacturing Company, 
and the Galveston (ias Company, and is vice presi- 
dent of the Island City Protestant Orphans' Home. 

During all his business life Judge Cleveland has 
given his special attention to the minutest details of 
his affairs. His success consists not so much in large 
receipts, as in taking care of what he has made. 
Frugal and unostentatious in life and bearing, he is 
warm in his attachments, generous and benevolent. 
His surplus earnings he invested judiciously, from 
time to time, in lands. He has been scrupulously 
exact in meeting his obligations, and no note of his 
ever went to protest. . His credit has always been 
good, because he never strained it, nor subjected it 
to hazard. He avoided contracting a debt without 
seeing how it could be paid at maturity, and I'aying it 
promptly. 

Judge Cleveland is a first-class man, whether we 
regard him as a civilian, a lawyer, or business man. 
His position is an enviable one, and it has been 
reached not by any improper arts, but by industry, 
integrity, the exercise of sound judgment, and the 
employment of the highest principles known to 
enlightened society. 



JAMES BOYLE. 

SHERMAN. 



MR. BOYLE, though seventy-four years of age, 
has the erect figurt, the elastic step and easy 
carriage of a well preserved gentleman. He has 
evidently studied, read, thought, traveled, observed, 
written and conversed much during all these years, 
so that their results have become a part of the man's 
personal presence, impressing themselves most agree- 
ably upon every one who is so fortunate as to be 
thrown into his coinpany. Mr. Boyle is of Quaker 
and Irish ancestry. His grandfather, Connel O'Boyle, 
was a sea captain, and a descendant of the O'Bud- 
hues, a race of Irish Kings. He married Miss Alice 
Dugan, in Donegal, Ireland, immigrated to this 
country and settled in Philadelphia, when John, the 
father of Mr. James Boyle, who was born in 1781, 
was yet an infant. 

John Boyle, when eighteen years of age, became a 
member of McCarthy's surveying party, passing 
through Zanesville, Ohio, when there was but one 
house, a log cabin, in the place Going afterwards 
to Delaware, he attended school in W\\\ Creek Hun- 
dred, a Quaker settlement eight miles north of Wil- 
mington. Here he became acquainted with a charm- 
ing young Quakeress, whom he shortly after married. 



After the birth of four children, one son, (James,) 
and three daughters, they removed to Ohio, and 
settled on a farm near Zanesville, w-here he died 
in the seventy-fourth year of his age, a few years after 
the death of his wile. 

James Boyle, born in Delaware in 1806, passed his 
childhood from three years old to twelve in the school 
room, and from that time till he was twenty in work- 
ing on his father's farui. Going to Illinois, he 
attended Rock Spring Seminary for a time, then 
returned to Ohio and finished his course of study 
in the colleges of Kenyon and Granville. He was 
then for nine years county surveyor of Muskingum 
county. He next entered the Law School of Cin- 
cinnati and graduated in 1837. Removing from 
Zanesville to Cincinnati, he practiced his profession 
in that city thirty years, gaining prominence in his 
profession, and the confidence of all the leading men 
of the city. 

Mr. Boyle married the youngest daughter of Colo- 
nel George Jackson, the hero of three wars — t'hose 
of the Revolution, Indian and the war of 1812. 
He was a member of congress, first from Virginia, 
afterwards from Ohio. Stonewall Jackson and Wil- 



S6 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



liam T,. Jackson, lioth wfU known names, were of the 
same family. The eldest son of Mr. Cieorge Jackson 
succeeded him in congress. He became brother-in- 
law to James Madison, and his youngest son, Andrew 
R. Jackson, was a member of the California legis- 
lature. By his marriage with Miss Jackson, Mr. Boyle 
had eight children, five sons and three daughters. 
The oldest, John G., is married, has one child, and is 
United States district attorney, having his residence 
in Galveston; ('arrol (lleason has a wife and one 
child, was civil engineer on the Texas and Pacific rail- 
way, but is now in Chicago in the varnish business ; 
George Jackson is married, and was civil engineer on 
the Texas and Pacific, but is now yardmaster for the 
same company at Sherman ; Frank White is married 
and has been a clerk in the United States custom 
house in Galveston since 1874; Percy, the youngest, 
is assistant yardmaster at Sherman. Of the daugh- 
ters, Louise, is the wife of Watts I)e Golyer, a \arnish 
maker at Riverside, near Chicago; Lucy (i. is the 
wife of Edward ("00k, a ship chandler of Chicago, 
and Helen, the youngest daughter, is still unmarried 
and with her parents. 

Li 1874 Mr. Boyle left Cincinnati and moved to 
Galveston. Four of his sons had preceded him to 



Texas. In 1876 he removed to Sherman, where he 
lived, admired by many and honored by all. As a 
writer he has sought more to amuse himself than to 
achieve fame. Some of the productions of his pen 
have, h<)we\er, been given to the public. Among 
them should be particularly mentioned his abridged 
translation of Quintiliaii's Institutiiinfs Orafnriae, a 
a work of no inconsiderable labor, but ])erformed with 
great correctness and fidelity to the original, and 
receiving the comniendition of men of learning as a 
,masterly production. 

Mr. Boyle has but one sister living, Isabel, the wife 
of Rev. William Porter, jjresiding elder of the Metho- 
dist Episcopal church of ZanesviUe, Ohio. He (Mr. 

, Boyle) is, in politics, independent of party; is a 

I member of the Christian church, ever ready at the 
call of duty, with a liberal response either in charity 
or sympathy. 

1 Mrs. Boyle is a lady not unknown to fame. Many 
leading papers and magazines have been enriched by 

j her poetic contributions, and though as wife and 

1 mother of a large family she has excelled, she has 
found time to indulge her taste for literature. Such 

' are the women whose names deserve to be chronicled 

! among the noble ones of our country. 



DR. M. A. CORNELIUS. 



DALLAS. 



IN lULY, 1872, Dr. Cornelius came to Dallas on 
borrowed money, and has acquired a good prac- 
tice, a good home, and the confidence of a large por- 
tion of a very mixed and new community in his skill 
as a physician and his reputation as a gentleman. , 

Dr. Cornelius was born near Huntsville, Mad^ison 
county, Alabama, January 2, 1832, and raised on a 
farm. Besides the " ordinary schools of that country, 
he had the advantage of four years' attendance at 
the McKenzie Institute, under the celebrated Dr. John 
W. P. McKenzie, of Red River county. Texas, and [ 
afterwards of taking private lessons in Latin, mathe- 1 
matics and several of the sciences under Mr. Teas- 
dale, in Henderson, Texas. 

His lather, Absalom Cornelius, was born in South 
Carolina, moved first to Wilkes county, Georgia, 
where he married, thence to Alabama, and in 1S38 to 
Texas, where he died in 1845. His mother, Marga- 
ret Ward, was the daughter of Matt Ward, an Irish- 
man, a farmer and slaveholder in Talladega county, 
Alabama. She died at the house of her son in Dal- 
las, at the age of eighty-six. Her brothers were Col- 
onel Matt Ward, for years a member of the Texas 
congress and United States senator before the war 
commenced, Martin, Thomas J., Dr. William, John 
and Lewis Ward, all good and solid men. Dr. Wil- 
liam Ward, a banker and railroad man at Jefferson, 
Texas, (whose daughter, Mary Ward, was married to 
Judge John L. Cam|i, of Gilmer, 'I'exas.) Professor 



Sam Ward, of Jefferson, and Rev. William E. Ward, 
once editor of the Banner of Peace and founder of 
Ward Seminary, Nashville, are her nephews. 

Dr. Cornelius has two brothers living: Roland 
Cornelius, an independent farmer at Henderson, 
Texas, married to Martha Dyer, daughter of General 
John Dyer, of Red River county ; Captain W. P. Cor- 
nelius, farmer and merchant, Clarksville, Texas, who 
has been three times married — first to Arabella, 
daughter of Edward West, for many years sheriff of 
Red River county ; next, to Mrs. Reagan, a widowed 
daughter of Mrs. Mary Donahoe, and lastly, to Mrs. 
Herbert. 

Four of the Doctor's lirothers are dead: Ira. 
Hiram, Martin D., John L. and Thomas J. These 
were all men grown and had been successful in busi- 
ness. His living sisters are, Mary Tullora, first mar- 
ried to George W. Dyer, a farmer, in the year 1846, 
and next to Ross Powell, of Cass county. They now 
live in Red River county. She has one son, Robert 
Dyer, a farmer near Waco, and Caledonia A., a 
daughter, now the wife of Colonel William A. Shaw, 
a lawyer and planter on Red river. He was a mem- 
ber for that county in the Texas legislature in 1873. 
Dr. Cornelius was destined by his father for a law- 
yer. Accordingly he commenced reading in the office 
of Armstrong .S; McClarty, Henderson, Texas, but 
soon abandoned it for the study of medicine, and 
commenced reading with his brother, Dr. Martin D 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



137 



daughter of James Driskell, a stock-dealer of Sanga- 
mon county. After his marriage he went on his farm, 
in Logan countv, where he remained five years, doing 
a profitable business. 

His wife's liealth proving delicate, he conceived 
the design of removing to Texas. In doing so he 
rejected the example of his uncles on both sides, and 
was the first of the family to strike out alone on the 
great sea of business. In 1872 he leased his farm 
and removed to Fort Worth, Texas. 

Mr. and Mrs. Lake have three children: Ollie M., 
born October 18, 1871; Thomas W., born July 30, 
1874, and James William, born January 20, 1876. 

Mr. Lake is not a politician, nor does he take an 
interest in political affairs, but generally votes with 
the Republicans. He is a member of the Knights of 
Pythias. Neither he nor his wife is a member of any 
religious society, but both contribute liberally to 
church enterprises and the support of the ministry. 
He has always been a man of steady habits, and 
indulges in no form of dissipation. 

In November, 1875, with a capital of $2,000, he 
began the hardware business in Fort Worth. During 
the first year his sales amounted to $35,000. The 
next year they reached $60,000, and they steadily 
increased, until in the year 1879 they amounted to 



$85,000. and he estimates his sales for the year 1880 
at $100,000. 

His business house is located on the corner of Sec- 
ond and Houston streets. The main building is 
fifty by one hundred feet in size, and is the property 
of Mr. Lake. He has three warehouses: one near the 
depot, in which he stores agricultural implements ; one 
in the south part of town, used for stores, and a third 
on Third street, for storing tinners' stock, nails, sheet- 
iron, wire, etc. His wholesale trade extends into all 
the counties of western Texas that are tributary to 
Fort Worth. Besides the store and warehouses pre- 
viously mentioned, he owns a private residence 
worth $2,500, a farm of one hundred and sixty acres 
in Tarrant county, several hundred acres of wild land 
in Dickinson county, and a farm of one hundred and 
sixty acres in Logan county, Illinois. He owns a 
small interest in the El Paso hotel, and has other 
interests of minor value. 

His success is attributable solely to close attention 
to business from early morning till late at night. He 
is not afraid to take hold of any hard work necessary 
to be done. He treats all customers with courtesy, 
keeps his word and stands up to his agreements, and 
sees that his men, of whom he employs about ten, 
do the same. 



JOHN JAY GOOD. 



DALLAS. 



AMON(i the men of note who entered manhood's 
u struggle in north Texas, stands forth John Jay 
Good, of Dallas, the son of a worthy and prosper- 
ous manufacturer at Columbus, Mississippi, who gave 
him a good education in the primaries of the country 
and at Cumberland College, Lebanon, Tennessee. 
When just entering manhood's estate, he settled as a 
lawyer in the village of Dallas, Texas, and has ever , 
since resided there, and is now (1881) the mayor of 
the then village, but now a prosperous city of fifteen 
thousand inhabitants. 

He soon married Susan A., daughter of Mr. Nat C. 
Floyd, from Union county, Kentucky, a lady of 
refinement and great excellence of character, yet 
spared to him, by whom he has six children, the eldest 
of whom is his present law partner. \ 

As a lawyer his standing has ever been honorable, 
in both civil and criminal business. He has never 
sought to make a specialty of either, but rather to be a 
useful lawyer to his fellow citizens whose necessities 
demanded the em]jloyment of such. When young 
he imbibed a love of military life, and while a mere 
boy was elected a general of militia in Alabama, hence 
was early styled General Good, but had too much of 
the leaven of common sense to esteem sucTi a title, so 
held, as of intrinsic value in the estimation of character. 

From his location in Dallas in 1851 to this year of | 
1 88 1, he has been a consistent Democrat, often on the i 

IS-T 



stump, and always at war with centralism and those 
tendencies which he believed pointed towards a cen- 
tralized government ; in other words, a monarchy to 
be erected on the ruins of free government. P'or 
thirty years, in season and out of season, he has been 
a faithful sentinel on the watch-tower of public liberty. 
V.'hen Mr. Lincoln was elected as a sectional presi- 
dent in i860, Mr. Good was an open and avowed 
advocate of secession, and made many addresses to 
the people in favor of the measure. He organized 
and was elected captr.in of the first artillery company 
in Texas offered to the Confederate government. As 
such he was under General Ben McCuUoch, in 
southwest Missouri, in the fall of 1861, and performed 
gallant deeds at Elkhorn in March, 1862. Transfer- 
red to the east side of the Mississippi immediately 
afterwards, his battery did gallant service in the battle 
of Farmington, following that of Shiloh and preceding 
the bloody day at Corinth. About that time a reor- 
ganization of the army occurred, and Captain Good 
returned to his home in Dallas, but soon after joined 
a regiment newly organized and commanded by 
Colonel B. Warren Stone; but he soon received a 
commission a])i)ointing him presiding justice of a 
standing military court east of the Mississippi, with the 
military rank of colonel. He at once repaired to his 
new field of duty, and there continued till the close of 
the war, when, with his family, he returned to Dallas in 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



1865, utterly broken up and with only twenty dollars 
in money. As a military judge, it is said his rulings 
were always on the side of personal liberty and 
against the despotic exercise of power. 

On the reorganization of the state in 1866, he was 
elected district^ judge, by a large majority of the dis- 
trict in which he lived, embracing eleven counties. 
His administration was acceptable to the people, but 
in 1867 he was driven from the bench, as "an impedi- 
ment to reconstruction," by the order of a military 
satrap then stationed in New Orleans as a ruler over 
Louisiana and Texas. The name of this satrap, 
strutting in a litde brief authority and drunken with 
pompous self-conceit, was Philip H. Sheridan, the 
same who deposed Throckmorton, the people's chosen 
governor, and apjiointed in his stead a man who had 
been rejected by the people at the polls by a vote of 
more than four to one. As naturally as honor detests 
meanness, these actions, followed by a second and 
•forced system of reconstruction, wherein the intelli- 
gence and virtue of the state were largely denied a 
voice, and enfranchised ignorance was placed in the 
ascendent. Judge Good, in common with every 
patiotic man in the land, felt the degredation to which 
his fellow citizens'were reduced. At the earliest 
opportunity, which was not until 187 1, he took the 
stump and' hurled defiance at the oppressions and 
oppressors then weighing upon the people, appeal- 
inn to all who were allowed to, to register and vote. 



With John Henry Brown he canvassed several coun- 
ties in this behalf and the result of their joint labors, 
assisted by others of the same faith, was that the peo- 
ple carried the elections in 1872, secured a legis- 
lature in sympathy with the masses and broke the 
chains of despotism in so far that the next year the 
people elected a full quota of state officers and a leg- 
islature representative of their will. In those days, 
when Judge Good forsook self and hazarded all on the 
cast of a die, many gentlemen of ability remained 
quiescent at home — some advising abject submission 
to the ruling power, others a prudence amounting to 
moral cowardice, and yet others contended that all 
efforts at redemption would be fruitless. 

The state redeemed. Judge Good remained quietly 
at the bar, until taken up by the people and elected 
mayor of Dallas in August, 1880. 

He has been for many years an active Mason and 
Odd Fellow, attained to the highest degrees of each 
order, and is a zealous worker in them. He has a 
handsome home and large plat of ground in Dallas, 
and is surrounded by a devoted wife and children. 
He also has considerable other property elsewhere 
and has stock in several local enterprises, and alto- 
gether, considering the travail of the country ar.d that 
he is yet but in middle life, he has much for which to 
be thankful, not the least of which is the esteem in 
which he is held by those who have known him long- 
est and best. 



lUDGE ASA IKrX-e^' WILLIE. 

GALVESIVN. 



ASA HOXKe' WILLIE is a native of Washington, 
l\. Wilkes county, Georgia, and was born October 
I I, 1829. His father was James Willie, of Venifont, 
who, until his marriage, was a merchant ; but having 
acquired some projierty by his wife, became a farmer ; 
a iiuiet, retiring tnan, who died when his son was 
but four years old. ^^is mother, still living, is a 
daughter of Asa Hoxey, a Massachusetts ()uaker, who 
emigrated from Sandwich, on Cai)e Cod. The gene- 
alogy of the mother is distinctly traceable back to 
A.1'>. 1660, and somewhat less distinctly back to 
A. I). 1000. 

Asa II. Willie, left fatherless at the age of four, 
had not the advantages of a liberal education and a 
collegiate course, but through the imlustry and econ- 
omy of his mother, obtained at the Washington 
Academy, (which school he attended until he was 
fifteen vears of age,) such training as could be 
■afforded by one of the best high schools of that 
day. When sixteen years of age he assisted a 
cousin in teaching school, and taught while a stiident 
to get money to move to Texas, which he did in 
February, 1846, being then only a little over sixteen. 
He located at Independence, Washington county, 
and made his home with his uncle, Asa Hoxi^y, pur- 



suing the study of the law and the Spanish kmguage. 
This uncle came to Texas in the winter of 1833-4 
and was a member of what is called the consultation, 
which -was really the provisional government of Texas. 
He was a very large landholder and slaveholder, and 
was noted for his benevolence and hospitality, but was 
not a man to seek position, and the nephew has eyer 
had the same aversion to public life. Asa H. Willie 
was admitted to the bar by an act of the legislature 
in 1848. He settled and began practice in Brenham, 
Washington county, and there remained eigit or nine 
years. In 1S57 he removed to Austin and remained 
in the office of his brother, James Willie, at that time 
attorney-general of the state and commissioner for 
codifying the laws of Texas. 

The following year Mr. Willie remo\'ed to Marshall, 
and entered into partnershi]) with his brother-in-law, 
Colonel .Alexander Pojse, with whoin he practiced from 
1858 till 1866, a period of eight years. In the latter 
year he moved to Galveston and formed a partner- 
ship in the practice of law with the distinguished 
Judge f. F. Crosby, of Houston, a friend of his boy- 
hood. " In lune, 187 i, he effected a partnership with 
Judge Charles L. Cleveland, and that partnership has 
continued to the present time. 




W 'viXuD 



THR ENCVCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



139 



In August, 1852, while residing at ISrenham, Mr. 
Willie was elected prosecuting attorney of the then 
third judicial district of Texas. He held the oflice six 
months by appointment and two years by election, but 
declined a re-election at the close of his term. In 
1866 he was elected by the [leople of Texas a justice 
of the sujjreme court for a term of nine years. At 
the end of fifteen months service he was removed by 
military authority, (jeneral (Iriffin, commanding the 
department of Texas, removed all the civil officers of 
the state from governor down to justices of the peace, 
Judge Willie being one of the number. In 1872 he 
was elected to the forty-third congress from the state 
at large and served his full term. In congress he 
devoted his attention to the local interests of Texas, 
the improvement of Galveston harbor, frontier 
protection and other matters in which the Southwest 
was especially interested. He was a member of the 
committee on commerce. On the 17th of March, 
1874, he delivered in the hall of the house of repre- 
sentatives one of thcablest pleas amdmosf convincing 
argUiiients- iii^.brfTalf, of.^ajjprepriations for - rtie 
improvement of (lalveston harljor, made during 
that session of congress on commercial matters. He 
presented the recent growth and activity of Clalveston 
and its importance as a port of exit and entry ; the 
vast empire behind it laden with semi-tropical 
products for exportation; the small and inadecjuate 
appropriations for the improvement of a harbor that 
ran'ks eighth in the amount of its annual exportations ; 
the utter neglect with which Galveston had been 
treated up to 1867 ; the millions that had been lavished 
upon the New England, Middle and Western states ; 
the condition of the harbor for many successive years 
and the manner in which the energies of commerce 
had been paralyzed from want of ship channels into 
the harbor ; the cost of the neetled im])rovements, and 
the immense benefits that w'ould accrue to the state 
and country by the judicious expenditure of a compar- 
atively small sum upon the passes into Galveston bay. 
His speech showed great research and (-areful atten- 
tion to details, and was printed in pamphlet form and 
extensively circulated and read in the Southwest. 

At the close of his congressional term Judge Willie 
consented to become city attorney for Galveston, 
and served in that capacity in 1875-6. 

His military history may be embraced in a small 
compass, not because it was by any means valueless, 
but because it was comparatively uneventful. He 
enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861, and served 
through the war. He was on the staff of General 
John Gregg, occupying at different times the posi- 
tions of commissary, aid-de-camp, etc. During the 
last eleven months of the war he was stationed by 
General Kirby Smith at San Antonio to supervise the 
exportation of cotton. In his active campaigns he 
took part in the battles of Port Hudson, Chicka- 
mauga. Missionary Ridge, the siege of Jackson and 
other engagements of less note. 

Asa H. WilHe and Bettie Johnson were married at 
Marshall, Texas, October 20, 1859. Her father was 
Lyttleton Johnson, a merchant of Bolivar, Tennessee, 



who died when his daughter Bettie was an infant. 
Soon after his death she was taken to Brandon, Mis- 
sissippi, where subequently her mother married Wil- 
liam C. Harper, by whom she was reared. He died 
in i86g. Judge Willie and wife have se\en living 
children, three having died young. 

Judge Willie has led an active life, which has Ijeen 
devoted almost exclusively to his profession, and has 
amassed considerable property. He owns a very 
desirable residence on the corner of Broadway and 
Fifteenth streets, (ialveston. The house is of peculiarly 
southern architecture, roomy and comfortable without 
being showy. He is a shareholder in the Texas 
Banking and Insurance Company and a stockholder 
in other moneyed corporations. His principal estate, 
the proceeds of his first fee as an attorney, (the case 
having lasted twenty-five years.) is in Williamson 
county, and consists of 4,000 acres of land, as valua- 
ble as any in the state. He also owns wild lands in 
Fannin, Sao Jacinto, Liberty, Brazoria and other 
counties, amounting to 5,ooo of 7,000 acres. 

ii^^dge Willie has always been a Democrat and 
voted for secession. He has, however, in good faith 
accepted the results of the war*and ffie reconstructidn 
that has followed it. He is not connected with any 
religious society, but he was reared in the faith of the 
Methodist Episcojjal church, his mother being a 
member of that denomination. The wife of Judge 
Willie is an Episcopalian. He became an Odd Fel- 
low in 1854. 

When General Lamar was appointed by President 
Buchanan to be minister resident in the Argentine 
Republic, he selected Judge Willie to be his secretary 
of legation, who accepted the position and started 
with him. But when the destination of Cleneral 
Lamar was changed to Nicaragua, Judge Willie 
declined going. 

Some of the relati\es of Judge Willie have been 
distinguished in the fonun, at the bar and in the 
repubUc of letters. Colonel Alexander Pope, his 
partner and brother-in-law, was for a long time a 
member of the Georgia state senate ; was a member 
of the convention that passed the ordinance of seces- 
sion in Texas in 1861, and was known as a brilliant 
orator. He died in July, 1872. 

His cousin. Miss Fanny Andrews, daughter of Gar- 
nett Andrews, is an authoress, writing over the nom 
de plume of Elzey Hay. She wrote "A Mere Adven- 
ture," a novel; also one entitled "A Family Secret," 
and others. Her home is in Washington, Wilkes 
county, Georgia. CO-' 

His maternal uncle. Dr. Thomas Hox«5», of Col- 
umbus, (ieorgia, was an eminent physician and made 
a large fortune. His son, John Bulow Hoxey, was on 
(ieneral Rusk's staff and took part in the batde of 
San Jacinto. He afterwards practiced medicine in 
(ialveston. 

His cousin Annulett Ball, married (larnett Andrews, 
who was for twenty years judge of the superior 
court of (Georgia, and the nominee of the American 
party for governor of that state in 1855, but was 
defeated by a small majority by Herschel V. Johnson. 



140 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



One of her sons, Garnett Andrews, is a prominent 
lawyer in Mississippi. Another cousin, Dr. D. S. 
Ball, was a leading physician in New Orleans. 

His brother, James VVillie, his partner at Brenham, 
was attorney-general of Texas from 1856 to 1858; 
was the author of the criminal code and the code of 
criminal procedure ; a member of the first two legis- 
latures of the state from \V'ashington county ; brought 
Judge VV'illie to Texas, and was probably the best 
natural lawyer of his day. He died March 5, 1863. 

His only living brother, William Thomas Willie, is 
a farmer living at Independence ; has quite a genius 
for mechanics, and has invented and patented sev- 
eral useful devices. 

His sister married Colonel Alexander Pope, and 
died in September, 1864, aged thirty-nine. She left 
nine children. One of her sons, John H. Pope, is an 



State Medical Association, and inspector of the 
National Board of Health, and author of several 
noted essays in medical journals. .Another son, Wil- 
liam H. Pope, was county attorney, residing at Mar- 
shall, and like his younger brother, Alexander, has 
made quite a reputation as an orator. Three of 
her sons, James W., John H. and William H., were 
in the Confederate army, John H. having been 
severely wounded. 

Judge Willie is an able and popular lawyer. He is a 
man of compact build, five feet ten inches high, 
weighing one hundred and seventy pounds, and capa- 
ble of undergoing a great deal of labor. He is not 
yet an old man, and Texas has reason to expect of 
him further labors in her behalf. He is universally 
respected, and though not an office seeker, his emi- 
nent abilities may be still further drafted on for 
services to his ado])ted state. 

- - - ' ,CiC- -^ 



eminent physician and surgeon ; was president of the 

il^/^^^^.i^liC^.«^--^ COLONEL DeWITT CLINTON STONE. 



GALVESTON. 



THE warp and woof of historical narrative must 
be made of facts, and when men are Uke Colonel 
DeWitt CUnton Stone, whose career has been marked 
alone with deeds of honor, no retiring dislike for the 
world's plaudits should be allowed to shade or pale 
the brilliancy of the shining virtues of his character. 
When one's virtues veil themselves in a sensitive 
shrinking from the glare of public praise, it is difficult 
indeed to weave a robe of honor with which to drape 
their proudly modest form ; especially when the 
biographer is compelled, in some degree, to depend 
upon the man himself for much of his personal history. 
The influence of a good man will be ever expanding 
with the lapse of time, and his deeds of kindness, his 
acts of love, will live to commemorate his name, to 
perpetuate his memory. Men are only great from the 
standpoint of our observation, but there can be no 
power greater than the influence of a noble life, 
nothing more lasting than " its foot-prints left on the 
sands of time." 

DeWitt Clinton Stone was born at Hilliardston, in 
Nash county. North Carolina, on the 7th of October, 
1825. Of his ancestors but little is known, save 
the fact that his grandfathers on both sides were 
planters, and were also Revolutionary soldiers. His 
father, Thomas Green Stone, a planter, finely educated, 
of great moral worth and character, served the county 
in many important positions, representing it in the 
state senate ; was afterwards elected clerk of the 
senate, which position he held until his death, a period 
of seventeen consecutive years. He was a man of 
unostentatious character, but of much intelligence. 
He died at the early age of forty-six years, lamented 
by all who knew him. The resolutions of the state 
legislature on the event of his death bear evidence of 
the high esteem in which he was held by the body 



which he had served so long. His mother, Francis 
Yancey Hawkins, died at an early age, leaving only 
two children, a son and a daughter. The last men- 
tioned married Rev. T. M. Jones, at present the presi- 
dent of Greensboro Female College, and died many 
years since, leaving the subject of this sketch the only 
immediate representative of the family. 

Colonel Stone had all the advantages of a [jrimary 
school, and was sent to the University of North 
Carolina, at Chapel Hill, where he graduated in 1846. 
From here he went to the law school of the late Chief 
Justice Pearson to prepare himself for the bar. He 
first entered upon the practice' of law in FYanklin 
county, and was elected prosecuting attorney for the 
state and served one term successfully, and soon after 
his re-election was married to Mary M. Yarbrough, sec- 
ond daughter of Richard Fenner Yarbrough, a prom- 
inent and wealthy merchant of Louisburg. Shortly 
after his marriage, finding mercantile pursuits more 
congenial to his tastes than the law, he resigned his 
position as prosecuting attorney and entered into 
this business. Notwithstanding this he was elected 
county judge by the people, and made one of the 
trustees of the university by the state legislature. 

In i860 the subject of our sketch moved to Galves- 
ton and commenced the commission business, but the 
war between the states coming on the following year, 
and business prospects being destroyed, he entered 
into the service of the Confederate States, and was 
active in facilitating the introduction of supplies for 
the government. Though not in the field, he was an 
ardent friend of the Confederacy, and sank his all with 
the result. 

U])on the termination of the war he returned to 
Galveston and resumed business, though broken down 
in fortune. He was elected three years in succession 




cjf^ ^- 




THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



141 



president of the Cotton Exchange, and while holding ] 
this position was chosen by the people mayor of the 
city, with such a majority over his opponents, R. L. 
Fulton, then mayor, and Charles Leonard, ex-mayor 
of the city, as no man had ever received. In politics 
he has always been an unswerving Democrat, but has 
held no political office save that of mayor of the <ity. 
He was married, 1850, to Mary Mildred Yarbrough, 
whose father was a man of marked character and 
business capacity, ha.\ing amassed a fortune in those 
days. She was educated at St. Mary's Hall, Raleigh, 
North Carolina, under the late Dr. -Smedes : was dis- 
tinguished for her gentleness of manners, close apjili- 
cation, ready genius, and high standing in her classes ; 
now a woman of rare grace and lovliness, who has 
twined about his life the sweetest of womanly affec- 
tion, sharing alike his many public honors and his few 
]jrivate sorrows. Lovely and amiable, Mrs. Stone has 
indeed been to her husband even as a lamp to his 
feet, the light of his heart and life. Wearing the 
bright crown of motherhood gracefully, her children 
have grown up about her a blessing to both herself 
and husband ; and if three little graves have cast deep 
shadows across their threshold, the sunny lives of their 
remaining three children, two sons and one daughter, 
have at least brightened the gloom and lifted the cur- 
tains of grief from the consecrated chamber in their 
hearts. Mrs. Stone has ever been to her husband the 
brightest star of his home and the dearest jewel of his 
heart. 

The best and noblest part of man's life here, 1 

Is that wherein he loves and honors woman, 

'Tis then his soul is lifted to a higher sphere ; 
In all things else, his nature is but human. 

Colonel Stone is a rare instance of an open, gener- 
ous, impulsive and highly vitalized nature, devoted 
from youth to middle age to mercantile pursuits, with 
occasional episodes of politics, without a trace of 
demoralization. He has the warmth of youth without 
its fever, the mellowness of age without its frosts. 
He still adheres to the busy man of offices, and no 
appeal for personal or pecuniary aid is ever made to 
him in vain. He has been conspicuous from his 
youth up for an uncommonly fine person, courtly bear- 



ing, flowing, cordial manners, ready conversational 
gifts, the most delicate sense of honor, and withal, the 
most unaffected modesty. Without seeking (jopular 
favor, he has always possessed it in an uncommon 
degree. Whilst haliitually shunning, with the instincts 
of a fine nature, the public gaze, he has never failed 
to have accorded to him a prominent and inlluential 
position .among his fellow men. Fitted for almost any 
public trust, he has wisely, and not less usefully, 
chosen to illustrate in his own person the virtues and 
graces which combine to form the character of a gen- 
tleman, pure and simple. 

The elder son, Heber Stone, was sent to the Uni- 
versity of the .South at fifteen years of age, remained 
there one year, was then entered at the University of 
Virginia, where he remained until the completion of 
his college course ; returned home and read law in 
the office of (leneral Wane, a distinguished lawyer of 
Cialveston, was admitted to the bar at twenty years of 
age, delivered an address before the Historical Society, 
of much merit for one so young. Soon after obtain- 
ing license to practice law, he settled himself in Brown- 
wood, Texas, and was soon after elected county 
attorney, which office he resigned. He was married 
on the fourth of June, 1879, to Louise, only daughter 
of the late I. I). Giddings, a distinguished lawyer and 
banker, of Brenham, Texas, and is now a resident of 
that city and is engaged in the banking business, 
being a member of the firm of Ciddings & Ciddings. 
He has a fine personal presence, a cultivated manner, 
and is distinguished for great moral worth. His 
extreme devotion and love for his mother has been 
one of the marked characteristics of his life. 

Clinton Stone, the second son, has been em|)loyed 
in the office of his father in the cotton business, is apt 
and sprightly, and bids fair to make a fine business 
man. He is too young to have developed any 
decided character. 

Mary is the only daughter, is now (1880) at school 
in St. Mary's, in Raleigh, North CaroUna. She is a 
lovely child, just budding into rosy girlhood. These 
children are the pride and pleasure of their parents. 
Father, mother, brothers and sister, constituting one 
of the happiest families the writer ever knew. 



GENERAL JOHN R. JEFFERSON. 



SEC, U IN. 



JOHN R.JEFFERSON was bom May 11, 1804, 
in Cumberland lounty, Yirginia. His grand- 
father, John Jeft'erson, was one of the two brothers 
who settled, and at one time owned half of Cumber- 
land county ; he was a cousin of President Thomas 
Jefferson, they being the sons resjiectively of Field 
and Thomas Jefferson, twtj brothers ; was at one time 
sheriff of Cumberland; married a cousin of Lord 
Brougham ; was immensely wealthy, three hundred 
negroes having been sold from his plantation at one 



time, leaving man\' still his |.iroperty. His father, 
John Jefferson, was born in Cumberland county, a 
man of leisure and pleasure, who cared inore to enjoy 
than to accumulate wealth. It is a singular fact that 
most of the issue of the Jefferson fainily have been 
females ; the name is dying out, the subject of this 
sketch having one brother and six sisters, which is a 
fair sample of the proportion of males and females. 
John Jefferson, father of John R. Jefferson, mar- 
ried Miss Sarah Criddle, a native of Cumberland, 



I.|2 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



born in 1785. Her father, John Criddle, was a farmer 
and a soldier of the Revolution. The Criddles were a 
famil)' of ]jlain peojile, never particularly distinguished, 
but good farmers and wealthy. John has been heard 
to say that there never was but one really great man 
ill the Jefferson family — President Thomas Jefferson. 
.\nn .S. Jefferson, sister of John R.. married Dr. John 
P. Ford, and her daughter, Delia, is the wife of Dr. 
John Calender, superintendent of the Nashville 
Lunatic .Xsylum. 

John Jefferson died when young John was but 
twelve years old, and his widow moved to Nash- 
ville, Tennessee, in 1818. Here John lived eleven 
years. In 1829 he went to New Orleans and engaged 
in staging. From 1832 to 1868, he was extensively 
engaged in stage contracts, some of which amounted 
to $100,000 per annum. He was twice a resident of 
New Orleans, the first time from 1829 to 1833. In 
the latter year he moved to Clinton, Hinds county, 
Mississippi, where he lived for twenty years. In 1853 
he moved to Seguin, Texas, and has ever since made 
that his home. 

For a period of twenty-five years he employed 
about one thousand head of horses in his various 
stage lines in the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Mis- 
sissippi and Alabama. From 1854 to 1858 he had 
several lines of stages in Texas ; but as the business 
required him to travel a great deal, he abandoned it 
and began the more agreeable and independent bus- 
iness of farming. 

He is at present the owner, besides a few lots of an 
acre each in Seguin and considerable personal prop- 
erty, of a fine farm of two hundred and fifty acres 
adjoining the town, one hundred and seventy-five 
acres of which are in cultivation. He values his land 
at thirty dollars per acre, and the fruitful soil and 
varied products of this farm make the valuation very 
low. His land will yield an average annual crop per 
acre of one thousand pounds of seed cotton, thirty 
bushels of corn, sixty of oats, sixteen of wheat, {city 
of rye, and sorghum enough to make five hundred 
gallons of syrup. Millet yields two tons per acre, or 
forty bushels of seed. From seven acres of ground 
he has threshed three hundred bushels of seed, and 
the straw after the threshing was worth as much as 
common hay, the millet seed selling readily at three 
dollars per bushel. Fruits are abundant. Peaches 
have failed but once in twenty years. Early apples, 
pears, plums, etc., yield well. The Guadalupe river 
falls are on this land, and furnish fine water power. 
Mesquite timber, rich in tannin, is abundant, while 
hackberry, mulberry, box-alder, black walnut, syca- 
more, pecan and white oak with its festoons of moss 
are the principal forest growths. The country is 
unusually healthy, and endemic malarial diseases are 
almost unknown. From June to September the mer- 
cury ranges from eighty to one hundred degrees 
Fahrenheit during the day, while cool and refreshing 
sea or gulf breezes cool and make pleasant the nights. 
The population of his section is of a peaceful and law 
abiding class, both white and colored. Seguin is 
growing steadily, and the country is filhng up with 



first class citizens. Religious and jjolitical toleration 
is the rule. 

During his residence in Mississippi he was a briga- 
dier-general of militia from 1842 to 1846. He was 
married in Hinds county, Mississippi, June, 4, 1841, 
to Miss Eliza A. Coorpender, daughter of Dr. Lewis 
Coorpender, a native of the "Old North State." She 
was born in 1826 at Raleigh, North Carolina. Her 
mother was a Miss Fenner, daughter of Dr. Robert 
Fenner, of Jackson, Tennessee. Her uncle. Dr. Eras- 
mus Fenner, was the founder of the first medical 
journal established in New Orleans. She has five 
uncles who are physicians, and her people on both 
sides are prosperous in business and professional life. 

General Jefferson and his wife had ten children, 
five of whom are living. Eugenia, born in Hinds 
county, Mississippi, in 1849; educated at .'\thens, 
Alabama, and Seguin, Texas ; married first to Dudley 
Jeffreys, and after his death to Frank Saunders, of 
Seguin. John R., born in Clinton, Mississippi, 
in 1851; educated in Texas; entered the army at an 
early age; married Miss J. P. Miller, and has five 
children ; is a prosperous farmer, rearing fine cattle 
being a specialty. His five children are John R., 
Robert M.. Elizabeth, Anna, and Mary Lou. Fen- 
ner, born in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1852; educated 
at Seguin, now living with his father. Betty Howard, 
born in Seguin in 1858, and educated there; still 
under the paternal roof Mary Lou, born in Seguin 
in i860; married W. H. Burges, the well known 
criminal lawyer, orator and politician of -Seguin. The 
following children of General Jefferson are dead: 
Mattie, born in Mississppi in 1843, educated in 
Texas, Mississippi and New Orleans; in 1865, was 
married to Haywood Brahan, son of R. W. Brahan, 
formerly of Huntsville, Alabama; died August, 1S77, 
leaving five children, Annie, Robert, Haywood, 
Eugenia and Erskine, the latter of whom lived but 
one year. The others died in infancy. 

General Jefferson is a Master Mason and a member 
of the Episcopal church, the church of his ancestors. 
He is a hfe-long Democrat, as all his family are or 
have been. 

He has several times been the possessor of a large 
fortune. By the failure of the banks in 1839 he lost 
$300,000, but his credit was not impaired nor was his 
estate exhausted. He has been at all times the advo- 
cate of Colonel Benton's financial policy, opposed to 
banks and in favor of "hard money." He made sev- 
eral fortunes by staging, and as a contractor he 
always stood high, as his accounts with the post- 
office department show. 

He has ever been convivial, but though as strongly 
tempted as most men, was never intoxicated in his life. 
His energy was remarkable. He acted upon the 
principle that he could endure and do whatever any 
other man could. He was ever self-reliant, and while 
he sometimes counseled with others, he always relied 
on his own judgment. He had an intuitive knowl- 
edge of men, and read them with great fiicility. 
Hence his agents rarely disappointed him. He is a 
lover of horses and other stock, of which he is con- 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



143 



fesst'dly an excellent judge. His farming operations 
have been successful. Though nearly seventy-seven 
years of age and compelled to walk with crutches, his 
mind is yet vigorous and active. He is very com- 
panionable in society, communicative without volu- 
bility, and pleasing without gayety. He is descending 
the shadowy slope gracefully, with heart kindly dis- 
posed toward all, and enjoying the fruits of an active 
and useful life. 

In height he is six feet and weighs one hundred and 
sixty pounds. His eyes are blue, his hair thin and 



silvery and his beard white as snow. General Jeffer- 
son has been worth a ([uarter of a million dollars, but 
lost most of his immense fortune. No man in Missis- 
sippi was better known than he. 

During the Rebellion he was Confederate States 
marshal for the western district of Texas, and gave 
general satisfaction. In 1865 he broke his hip 
joint, and since then has been compelled to use 
crutches. He and his family have the respect of 
Seguin society, of which they form a conspicuous and 
important part. 



REV. GEORGE WAVERLEY BRIGGS. 



GALVESTON. 



GEORGE WAVERLEY BRIGGS was born in 
Greensboro, Hale county, Alabama, December 
14, 1851. His father, Rev. A. J. Briggs, is also a 
native of Greensboro ; has been a devoted minister of 
the Alabama Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church South many years ; has been stationed at 
some of the most important cities of the state; was 
a presiding elder, and is still a member, of the Ala- 
bama Conference. His mother is a daughter of 
Samuel C. Brewer, now of Mississippi, and was born 
in Danville, Virginia, in 1832. She was thoroughly 
educated, and took special pains to superintend 
the education of her children. Mr. Briggs has 
one brother in the ministry, Rev. Ritchie J. Briggs, 
born November 21, 1853, educated at Greensboro, 
became a minister in 1873, is now a member of the 
Alabama Conference, stationed at Camden, is the 
orator, poet, pride and pet of the family. 

Cieorge W. Briggs had su])crior educational advan- 
tages. He was reared a student, and did little or 
no manual labor. P.efore he was sixteen he entered 
the Southern University at Greensboro, and after- 
wards spent a year in the High School at Eufaula. 
Later he was a student in East Alabama College. 
His father moved to Summerfield, Alabama, and 
and young Briggs, having resolved to study law, 
began the study of that science in the office of Judge 
Woods, in Selma. His earliest predilections, however, 
were for the ministry, and a conflict arose in his mind 
between what he felt was a duty and his disposition 
to engage in a lucrative profession. This conflict 
resulted in a trium])h of duty, and he laid aside his 
law books and entered the .Southern University in 

1872. The tbliowing year he graduated as bachelor 
of philosophy under Chancellor A. S. .-Vndrews, 1). D. 
This closed his collegiate course. 

In his twenty-second year he was licensed to preach, 
and was received into the Alabama Conference in 

1873. Two years later he was ordained a deacon at 
Greenville by Bishop Marvin, and an elder in 1877 
by Bishop Keener, at Montgomery, Ijeing then in his 
twenty-sixth year. He was immediately transferred 
to the Texas Conference. In 1878, by Bisho[) 



Wightman's rerjuest and appointment, he took charge 
of St. James church, in Galveston, of which he had 
charge two years. In 1880, by Bishop McTyi'-Tf, he 
was transferred to St. John's church in the same city, 
of which he is is still (1881) the pastor. The church 
edifice, located on the corner of Broadway and Bath 
avenue, is a two-story brick, built in gothic style, and 
having beside the main audience room, (which has a 
seating capacity of 1,000, and a $5,000 organ,) a 
Bible class room, an infant class room, a Sunday 
school room and a pastor's room. The latter con- 
tains portraits of former pastors of the church, the 
most noted of whom were Rev. J. B. Walker, D. D., 
now pastor of the of Carondelet Street church, New 
Orleans; Rev. Cleneral L. M. Lewis, who has recently 
accepted the presidency of Waxahachie C!ollege, and 
Rev. VVm. Shaii[iarcl, D. D., now ])astor of the First 
Methodist church at Austin. The building is the 
most complete and elegant Methodist Episcopal 
church in the West, south of St Louis. ']"he member- 
shi|) numbers three hundred and fifty, and proliably 
represents as much wealth as any Methodist congre- 
gation in the Gulf states. 

Mr. Briggs has won his position by devotion to his 
work. He has had the highest love for his profession, 
and has labored with the greatest enthusiasm. 
Although still young he has studied nature closely, and 
his illustrations are drawn from the every-day occur- 
rences and common affairs of life. His sermons are 
practical, and are prepared evidently with labor and 
and care. He speaks without manuscript, or even 
notes, but is never diverted from the thread of his 
discourse. If there is an a])parent digression it is 
for a purpose aid forms part of the rounded and per- 
fect whole. All Christian denominations listen with 
pleasure to his sermons, and the young of both sexes, 
with whom he is immensely popular, (tuck to his 
church. Without being sensational, he is an earnest 
preacher; but he does not belong to the class denom- 
inated revivalists. His pictures of home touch the 
hearts of the strangers, who form so large a part of 
the population of Galveston and of his audiences. 
His daily walk is in keeping with his high calling, 



144 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



and his character as a minister and a man is blame- 
less. His diction is pure, well selected and adapted 
to the subject under examination. He has grand 
thoughts which he clothes in such language as 
the illiterate may grasp and understand. His 
descriptive powers are unsurpassed. His figures 
are apt, his arguments imposing, and his per- 
suasive eloquence such as rarely fails to reach his 
auditors. 



Mr. Briggs has already achieved much, and he 
has before him a grand field for the exercise of his 
abilities. He is a good student, his mind being of 
that inquisitive character not readily satisfied with 
surface gleanings. The truth is sought, and the ulti- 
mate truth whenever and wherever it can be found. 
Few young men have so suddenly risen to eminence, 
and fewer still have more thoroughly deserved 
distinction. 



COLONEL WILLIAM W. FONTAINE, A. M. 



ACS TIN. 



WILLIAM WINSTON FONTAINE was born 
at Montville, King William county, Virginia, 
November 27, 1834. His father, William Spots- 
wood Fontaine, was born in Hanover county, Vir- 
ginia, November 7, 1810; received a full classical 
education ; was married July 5, 1832 ; settled in King 
William county ; in early life represented that county 
in the state legislature for several sessions ; was 
commissioned colonel of the county regiment ; about 
1852 withdrew from political life, and was ordained a 
minister of the Baptist denomination, and is living at 
present, in full mental and jjhysical strength, at Reids- 
ville. North Carolina. He is of Huguenot extraction, 
being eighth in descent from a French nobleman and 
officer in the household of Francis I, John L)e la 
Fontaine, martyred in 1563 ; ancestor of ail the Fon- 
taines and Maurys in Virginia. 

Rev. WiUiam Spotswood Fontaine's father, Wil- 
liam Winston Fontaine, was the son of John Fon- 
taine, and his wife, Martha, eldest daughter of 
Patrick Henry, the orator and governor of Virginia. 
Rev. William Spotswood Fontaine, throughv his 
mother, Martha, daughter of Nathaniel West I)an- 
dridge, jr., is the great-great-grandson of Major-Clen- 
eral Alexander Spotswood, colonial governor of 
Virginia, the eleventh in descent from Sir Robert de 
Spottiswoode, born about 1249, of the barony of 
Spottiswoode, county of Berwick, Scotland. Oon- 
ernor Spotswood was thirteenth in desent from King 
Robert the Bruce, through his great-granddaughter, 
the Princess Catherine Stuart, fifth daughter of King 
Robert II and his first wife. Lady Elizabeth More. 
The Princess Catherine Stuart married David Lindsay, 
first Earl of Crawford. Rachel Lindsay, (daughter of 
Dr. David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross in 1600,) the 
seventh in descent from the Princess Catherine, mar- 
ried Archbishop John Spotswood, Lord High Chan- 
cellor of Scotland. Their son. Sir Robert Spotswood, 
Secretary of Scotland during the reign of Charles 
I, was executed January 17, 1646, on account of his 
adherance to the royal cause. Sir Robert's third 
son. Dr. Robert Spotswood, was the father of tleneral 
Alexander Spotswood, governor of Virginia. 

Nathaniel West Dandridge, jr., mentioned above, 
was the son of Colonel Nathaniel West Dandridge, 



sr., who married Dorathea, youngest daughter of 
Governor Spotswood. (General Robert E. Lee was 
the great-grandson of Governor Spotswood's eldest 
daughter, Mrs. Ann Catherine Moore). Colonel 
Nathaniel West Dandridge, sr., was the son of Cap- 
tain William Dandridge, H. B. M. navy, and Unity, 
daughter of Nathaniel West, son of Colonel John 
West, governor of Virginia, in 1635. Colonel Nathan- 
iel West Dandridge, sr., was full brother to Mary, 
wife of Philip Aylett, and mother of Colonel William 
Aylett, commissary general. The mother of Colonel 
Fontaine was Miss Sarah Shelton Aylett, the daugh- 
ter of Colonel Philip Aylett, of Montville, and his 
wife, Elizabeth Henry, third daughter of Patrick 
Henry. Patrick Henry was great-nephew, and Lord 
Brougham was grandson of William Robertson, the 
great historian. General Joseph E Johnston is great- 
nephew of Patrick Henry. She was born at Mont- 
ville, June 24, 181 1, and died in Reidsville, North 
Carolina, March 5, 1876. She was a woman of great 
suavity of manner, and remarkable for her intellectual 
power and personal lieauty. Colonel Philip Aylett 
was the son of William Aylett, colonel and com- 
missary-general of the southern department during 
the Revolution, and his wife, Mary, daughter of Col- 
cniel Limts Macon, and his wife, Elizabeth Moore, 
daughter of Colonel .\ugustine Moore, of Chelsea, 
King William county, Virginia. 

R. A. Brock, the anti(iuary, in the Richmond StnnJ- 
11 rd, says : 

Among ihe older families of those long scateil in Virginia, 
none are more highly esteemed than that of Aylett, which 
indeed may claim connection by intermarriage with quite all 
those of prominence in the state. liiU a glance at its lineal 
deduction will exhibit lustrous names which have adorned 
every period of her annals — pioneer, statesman, soldier, orator 
and scholar — all are represented. 

The record of descent of this fiimily, condensed 
from Burke's account, is as follows : 

The Aylett or Ayloffe family is of Saxon extraction, being 
descended from one Alulphus. a Saxon. From this Alulphus 
descended .Ayliff, a person of great note in the time of Edward 
the Confessor. About the reign of Henry VI, we find a 
descendant of this Ayliff, a certain John Aylofl", seated in Essex 
county, holding large possessions. The sixth in descent from 
this |ohn .Ayloff was Sir Benjamin Ayloffe ov Aylett, the name 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NP:\V WEST. 



433 



mcnt and so remained two years. He next became 
vice president and professor in the Female College of 
Mansfield, Louisiana, serving also a year as pastor of 
the church. 

At Mansfield, in 1858, Mrs. Pitts died, leaving five 
children. In the year 1857 he first met his present 
wife, Miss Sallie J. McNeeley, a teacher in the Female 
( 'ollege at Mansfield. They were subsequently mar- 
ried at Auburn, Alabama. She was the daughter 
of Richard and Sarah McNeeley, small farmers, near 
Oak Bowery, Alabama, and was the eldest of a fam- 
ily of seven children. She had no opportunities for 
education except in the small country schools, near 
her home, until she had fully entered her teens. 
Then accident threw the Reverend George Chatfield 
in her way. Ill-health sent him into the country, and 
he took charge of Sardis Academy, an institution 
one-eighth of a mile distant from her father's. In this 
school she exhibited such marked mental ability that 
Mr. Chatfield determuied that she should be edu- 
cated for a teacher, if her parents approved. Neither 
they nor herself had ever dreamed that in the sim- 
ple, unaffected, country girl there were powers capa- 
ble of the highest culture ; and when her father was 
convinced of the fact, he left no stone unturned in the 
accomplishment of the object. When first the fires of 
thought were kindled in her mind, there arose an 
almost insatiable thirst for knowledge. She loved it 
for itself, and after she entered college, she had no 
thought but for her books. Her march was rapid. 
Her studies were directed with the view of making her 
a teacher. In 1855 she graduated from Oak Bowery 
College with the highest honors. She immediately 
became a teacher in that institution ; but in a few- 
months found a more lucrative position in LaFayette 
College, where she remained a year ; then taught a 
private school one year, when she was offered and 
accepted a good situation in the Female College at 
Homer, Louisiana, where one of her former teachers 
was principal, .■\fter one year she accepted a position 
in Mansfield College, of which Dr. Pitts was a profes- 
sor. She remained a year and then returned to Ala- 
bania, to take position in the institution in which she 
had graduated, but which had been remo\'ed to Tus- 



kegee and re-estal)lislied as I'uskegee College. Dr. 
Pitts soon followed and married her. Beside her at 
the alar stood her old preceptor. Professor Chatfield, 
and her maternal uncle. Rev. T. J. Williamson. Dr. 
Pitts had just become president of the college at 
Auburn, and she at once entered upon duty as his 
assistant in the mathematical department, and has 
ever since been his co-worker. Two years later 
Dr. Pitts became president of the academy at Pratt- 
ville, Alabama, and, in 1862, of the Oplika Female 
College, where Mrs. Pitts first developed her superior 
talents as a music teacher, which has ever since been 
of her forte. In 1871 Wesleyan Female College, 
Macon, Georgia, conferred upon her the first hon- 
orary degree, an honor yet bestowed upon but five 
other ladies. This college is the first in the world 
clothed with authority by law to confer degrees upon 
ladies. 

In August, 1872, Dr. Pitts was chosen president 
of Chappell Hill Female College, the oldest in the 
state of Texas. He remained in that position seven 
years, and was then elected to the same trust in the 
North Texas Female College at Sherman. 

Mrs. Pitts, though of delicate frame, continues an 
indefatigable helpmate to her husband in the college, 
has nurtured, beside her own, her husband's first set 
of children, one of his sisters and two of her own, 
besides presiding over her own domestic affairs — 
verily, a true and noble woman. 

By his first marriage Dr. Pitts had five children : 
Anna N., married and died soon after; Julia H. C., 
Mary E., and Susan A., reside with their husbands, 
in Washington county, Texas. Epaminondas died an 
infant soon after his mother. 

By the second marriage there have been born four 
children: Walter A., a promising young man; the 
next died at birth ; Edgar M. died in infancy; Jonne- 
maie is a bright little school girl. 

Dr. Pi«s is a Democrat, has been thirty-three years 
a Mason, but does not meddle in politics, preferring 
to devote his whole time to the calling to which he 
has consecrated so many years of his life — the educa- 
tion of the young. Such men are rare and deserve 
the esteem of the wise and the good. 



COLONEL JAMES BOWIE. 

AfAR/VR OF THE ALAMO. 



THERE has never appeared anything approach- 
ing a full and correct memoir of this remarkable 
man. Fugitive anecdotes and incidents, often apoc- 
ryphal, have been published from time to time, chiefly 
devoted to the rougher side of his character, till the 
popular mind has long regarded him as a combination 
of gambler, soldier, ruffian and desperado. The 
writer laments that he cannot sujjply the void. In 
vain, through friends in New Orleans, he has sought 
to recover a memoir, once in his jiossession, written 

5,^.-T 



in modest sim]>licity, by his brother, John J. Bowie, 
of Mississippi, twenty-nine years ago, and the only 
authoritative statement known to him, ever given of 
the parents, birthplace and the brothers and sisters of 
Bowie. He deplores this failure and must rely, as 
others have done, on the somewhat accidental sources 
of information. It may be said, however, that his 
father was a man of high moral character and inflexi- 
ble integrity, while his mother was a devotedly pious 
woman — both natives of Prince George's county. 



434 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



Maryland, where their children were born. The sons 
were David, James, Resin P., John J. and Stephen, 
all large and muscular men. The Kowie family of 
Maryland has long been distinguished for wealth, 
education and high social position, as well as in poli- 
tics and jurisprudence. The parents of James Kowie, 
however, sometime between 1802 and 1810, settleti 
on the Mississippi, in Louisiana, not far from Natchez, 
Mississippi. Their sons were highstrung men, of fine 
address, endued with the spirit of enterprise and 
adventure; but James and Resin P. were the only 
ones who figured in Texas. 

James Bowie, prior to coming to ']"exas was a gen- 
eral trader in the "lower country," interested in plant- 
ing, but dealing in horses, mules and to some extent 
in slaves. The oft-repeated story that he bought 
wild negroes from I>afitte and sold them to planters, 
is regarded as a myth, as dates do not give credence 
to it. Such an occurrence may possibly have hap- 
pened in some isolated instant e, but, as a business, it 
is contradicted by his age and the final departure of 
Lafitte from the CJulf coast. That he was even a 
professional gambler is untrue ; but it is true that he 
was an adept in the games of chance then common 
in the Valley of the Mississippi, from Galena to New- 
Orleans, and, on rare occasions, he was lucky in win- 
nings — oftener, however, to recover the losses of an 
unfortunate friend than to win for himself Of this 
numerous instances were wont to be narrated by his 
old friends. 

He was ever passionately fond of hunting and wild 
adventure — his mind dwelling much on the discovery 
of gold and silver mines — in which he spent much time 
in Texas. It was while wounded, on one occasion, 
that he modeled in wood, with his pocket-knife, 
and on recovering, had a blacksmith to fabricate 
what has since been so universally known as the 
" Bowie-knife." He had no thought in its creation 
but that of an improved knife for sticking aod 
skinning game, and its still universal use for such pur- 
])oses is a tribute to his ingenuity. 

It is commonly said that he first came to Texas in 
1828; but this is clearly a mistake. He probably 
made a tour of the country in 1824 and certainly did 
in 1826. Perhaps not till 1828 was his business so 
arranged in Louisiana as to warrant his constant resi- 
dence in Texas. 

He married a daughter of Lieutenant-Ciovernor 
Veremendi, of an old Castilian family — a pure and 
charming woman, to whom he was devotedly attached 
and was equally loved in return. She bore him 
two or three children ; but herself, father and children 
fell victims to the cholera in 1832 or 1834, and 
Bowie never ceased to mourn fiir them. To some 
e.xtent he became a changed man by this great 
calamity. 

Of the celebrated sand-bar fight in front of Natchez, 
in 1828, in which he, his brother Resin P. and other 
friends were on one side, and an equal number on 
the other, it can only be said that it was a des])er- 
ate and bloody aftair, with loss of life and blood on 
each side. It was a wholesale duel, arranged by 



agreement and the result of a feud among fearless, 
not to say reckless, men. It is said that Bowie while 
down and unable to rise from a wound, grajipled his 
erect antagonist and killed him with his knife. I'he 
sur\ivors, however, separated, never more to renew 
the contest, and Bowie to recover from his ugly 
wounds. 

His first distinguished action in Texas,. was in a 
fight, while en route from San Antonio to the old San 
Saba silver mines, which occurred six miles before 
reaching the mine on the 2d day of November, 1831. 
Bowie's party consisted of himself as chief, his 
brother, Rezin P. Bowie, David Buchanan, Robert 
Armstrong, Jesse Wallace, Matthew Doyle, Cephas 
Hamm, James Coriell (Coiyell?) Thomas McCaslin 
and two servant boys, Charles and Gonzales. They 
had been advised by two friendly Comanches and a 
Mexican that they were followed by one himdred and 
twentv-four hostile Wacos and Tahuacanos and forty 
Caddos, who were determined to have their scalps. 
They chose as a night camp a cluster of thirty or 

'■• forty liveoaks, with much underbrush. To the north 
was a thicket of oak bushes and near by a stream of 
water. They prepared for defence by clearing out 
the interior of the thicket into which their horses 
were placed. The Indians appeared at sunrise next 
morning and the battle began — one hundred and 

I sixty-four Indians against nine men and two boys. 

' VV'ith varying fortune the contest continued till sunset, 
when the Indians drew off never more to renew the 
attack, but to howl their lamentations all night. The 
Indians, as subsequently learned, lost eighty-two in 
killed and wounded. Bowie lost one man killed and 

; three wounded. He remained in his covert eight 
days and was then twelve days in conveying his 
wounded back to San Antonio. In Yuakiim^s History 
and the Texas Scrap-Boo/; will be found a full and 
graphic account of this most remarkable and heroic 
action. 

The battle of Nacogdoches was fought August 2, 

; 1832, and Colonel Piedras retreated west during the 

j night of that day, but surrendered to an advance 

' guard of only nineteen men 'and boys, on the 
morning of the 4th, at the .\ngelina. Bowie arrived 
on the afternoon of the same day, the 4th of August. 
Piedras was escorted back to Nacogdoches and soon 
paroled. Bowie took charge of the six hundred Mex- 
ican soldiers and escorted them to the Rio Grande. 
On the old militaTy road traveled there was not a 
house from Nacogdoches to San Antonio — unless a 
cabin on the Brazos and one at Bastrop, on the Colo- 
rado — nor a human haliitatitin from San Antonio to 
the Rio Cirande, in all about fi\e hundred miles. 

Burning for revenge on the Indians who had fought 
him on the San Saba, he took command of a com- 
pany in the fall of 1832 to invade their country and 
made an extensive tour up the country from Sao Anto- 

I nio and thence across to their chief resorts on the 

[ Brazos. But the savages learned of the movement 
and that Bowie, the " Fighting Devil " of their imagi- 
nation, was at the head of it. and precipitately fled 

, further into the wilderness. In a trip of six or seven 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



435 



liuiidrLd miles lie never saw a single Indian. He 
returned greatly disappointed, but still resolved, at a 
more opportune season, to chastise them for. their 
]jerfidy. The o])portunity, however, never came. 

When the revolution broke out, in WS35, Bowie 
joined the army at Gonzales, under (General Stei)hen 
F. Austin, and moved with it upon San Antonio. 
From the camj) on the Salado, .\ustin disjjatched 
Howie and Fannin, with ninety-two men, to reconnoi 
tre and select a camp ground near the city. They 
encam])ed in a horse-shoe bend of the river immedi- 
atelv in front of the abandoned Mission of Concep- 
cion, about two miles below the town, and passed the 
night, but just at dawn next morning, were furiously 
attacked Iiy four hundred .Mexicans, with a battery of 
small guns. The action was short and decisive. The 
Texians, protetrted by the river hank, dealt death to 
them so rapidly that they precipitately fled to the 
shelter of the city, leaving many dead, while our loss 
was but one man, Richard .\ndrews. killed. This 
was the 28th of October. On the 26th of November 
Bowie again displayed his prowess in the Orass Fight, 
near San .\ntonio on the west, when the enem\ were 
driven headlong mto the town. 

.\t this time the jirovisional goxernnient was in its 
swaddling clothes in San Felipe. Howie had no regu- 
lar command. He was eager for active and honorable 
service and offered himself to the new tribunal ; but 
the legislative council, charged with so many and 
grave responsibilities, failed to respond immediately 
to his ap])lications for authority to raise and command 
a force. At least the delay was such as to cause 
Bowie to repair in jierson to the seat of government. 
His im]jetuosity could not brook delay, and after 
waiting some days, he suddenlv appeared at the bar 
of the council and essayed to address the president of 
the body. "Order! order I" rang through the hall, 
while Bowie stood erect, hat in hand, the |jersonifica- 
tion of splendid manhood and fierce determination. 
The air was full of revolution — Howie, the idol of a 
majority of the people. .\ crisis was at hand. The 
presiding officer was Lieutenant-Ooxernor James W. 
Robinson, one of the most talented, suave, bland and 
sagacious men in Texas. (Juick as lightning he 
grasped the situation, and substantially said: 

"(ientlemen of the council, while it is not stri( tly 
liarliamentary, yet you certainly will not object to 
hearing the views of one so long-tried, distinguished 
and courageous as Colonel Howie, on the condition of 
the i:ountry.'' 

Instantly a motion was made and carried in\iting 
Colonel Bowie to address the coimcil. 

This scene was afterwards described tome l)y Lieu- 
tenant-Governor Robinson, and I re])roduce the 
remainder of the episode as nearly in his own words 
as a riveted iiiemory can recall them. 

Howie was a splendid specimen of manhood — six 
feet and one inch high, straight as an arrow, of full 
but not surplus flesh, fair complexion, fine mouth, 
well-chiseled features and keen blue eyes — with grace 
and dignity in every movement. So far as known this 
was his first and last public speech. Stepping inside 



the railing, still hat in hand, with a graceful and digni- 
fied bow, he addressed himself to the president and 
council i'oT nearly an hour in a vein of pathos, irony, 
invective and fiery elo(iuence that astounded and enrap- 
tured his oldest and most intimate friends. He 
reviewed the salient points of his life, hurled from him 
with indignation every floating allegation affecting his 
character as a man of peace and honor — admitted 
that he was an unlettered man of the Southwest, and 
his lot had been cast in a day and among a people 
rendered necessarily, from jiolitical and material causes, 
more or less independent of Law ; but brave, gener- 
ous and infinitely scorning every S])ecies of meanness 
and duplicity ; that he had honorably cast his lot with 
Texas for honorable and patriotic ]jurposes ; that he 
had even neglected his own affairs to serve the coun- 
try in the hour of danger ; had betrayed no man, 
deceived no man, wronged no man, and had never had 
a difficulty in the country unless to protect the weak 
from the strong and evil intentioned. That, yielding 
to the dictates of his heart, he had taken to his bosom 
as a wife a pure and lovely woman of a different race, 
the daughter of a distinguished " Co.ahuil-Texano,"' 
yet, as a thief in the night, death had invaded his 
little paradise and taken his father-in-law, his wife and 
his little jewels, given to him by the Crod his pious 
mother had taught him to reverence and to love as 
'■ Him that doeth all things well," and chasteneth 
those He lo\eth ; and now, standing as a monument 
of Omnipotent mercy, alone of his blood in all Texas, 
all he asked of his country was the privilege, under 
its aegis, of serving it in a field where his name might 
be honorably associated with the brave and the true in 
rescuing this fair and lovely land from the grasp of a 
remorseless military despotism. 

The effect was magical. Not an indecorous or 
undignified word fell from his lips — not an ungraceful 
movement or gesture — but there he stood, before the 
astonished council and s[)ectators, the living exempli- 
fication of a natural orator. 

He tarried not, but left, satisfied that in the more 
perfect organization of the government, he would 
receive generous consideration, and returned to San 
.\ntonio, soon to be immured in a sick room — a dark 
little cell-shaped room in the Alamo — and there, after 
a siege of thirteen days, to be perhaps the last of the 
hundred and eighty-two martyrs to yield up his life 
for his country ; but not until, from that sick chamber, 
he had sent death through its door to a dozen or more 
of the assailants. Thus died Howie, to be cremated 
by the order and in the presence of .Santa x\nna, 
along with his hundred and eighty-one comrades. 

He was called ■' Colonel "" by courtesy ; but never 
actually held rank above cajjtain of a company. One 
of the early acts of the repubhc was to perpetuate his 
name in a county in the northeast corner of the state, 
now traversed by three great railroads. 

It was never my fortune to meet Colonel Howie, 
but he was an intimate friend of my father and two 
of my uncles, one paternal, the other maternal, all 
men of peace, and neither of whom ever had a per- 
sonal ditficultv in Texas ; and l)eyond this I enjoyed 



436 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



close associations in youth and early manhood with 
many good men who knew him long and well. Their 
universal testimony was that he was one of nature's 
noblemen, inflexible in honor, scorning double-dealing 
and trickery — a sincere and frank friend — kind and 
gentle in intercourse — liberal and generous — loving 
peace and holding in almost idolatry woman in her 
purity. He tolerated nowhere, among the rudest 
men, anything derogatory to the female sex, holding 
them as "but a little lower than the angels.'' In the 
presence of woman he was a model of dignity, defer- 
ence and kindness, as if the better elements of his 
nature were led willing captive at the shrine of true 
womanhood. But, when aroused under a sense of 
intended wrong, and far more so for a friend than for 
himself, " he was fearful to look upon," and if, as hap- 
pened at remote jieriods. under the influence of drink, 
he was a dangerous man to the wrong-doer. He 
was usually a man of few words, but exceedingly 
sociable and a good listener. Occasionaly, especially 
when pleasantly situated with friends around the cam[) 
fire, his fine conversational powers came into play 
and he would talk long and rapidly of men and things, 
always to the gratification of listeners. 

The preceding has all been written from informa- 
tion long in my possession ; but recently it has been 
my good fortune to receive several notes of recollec- 
tions of Colonel Bowie, from gentlemen who knew 
him well, and with pleasure they are submitted as a 
part of this memoir. 

Captain William V. Lacy, of Palestine, says : 

C'olonel Howie was six feet one incli high, weiglied two Imn- 
<lred poimd.s, was remarkably straight, square in form, walked 
erect, with firm step, had blue eyes, fair complexion, auburn 
hair, and was a man of commanding appearance. He was 
like Barnum's show, wherever he went everybody wanted to 
see him. From NLarch, 1834. for eight months. I was with him. 
examining lands on the Trinity up to the Cross-timbers (now 
Tarrant county.) He was esteeined weahhy. He seemed to 
be a roving man — sometimes searching for mines, sometiiryes 
fighting Indians, sometimes speculating in lands, and always 
a gentleman from bottom to top. He was accommotialing, 
kind and always had plenty of money. Howie once described 
to me the sand-bar duel in front of Natchez. Bowie was 
shot down ami one of the opposite party ran a sword-cane 
through his breast. Bowie, reaching up. jerked his antagonist 
down and killed him with his knife. He rarely referred to 
such things, luit once showed me the sword wound. He sel- 
dom laughed, but always seemed firm, pleasant and cheerful. 
I always felt as if with a friend and a gentleman when with 
Bowie. He was neither austere, haughty nor easily insulted. 
He was a great hunter and a splendid shot — the best I ever 
saw — had an e.xceedingly open and frank countenance. He 
was not in the habit of using profane language, and never used 
an indecent or vulgar word during the eight months I passed 
with him in the wilderness. 

Such is the testimony of Cajjtain Lacy, a gentle- 
man vener,al)le in years and of the highest reputation 
for morality and integrity. 

The venerable Captain Archibald Hotchkiss, of 
Palestine, now eighty-seven years of age and a gradu- 
ate of the United States Military Academy at West 
Point, says : 

I first met Bowie in Washington City in 1832. He was over 
iix (wt high, well proportioned, strong and muscular, wilh- 



auburn hair and dark, blue eyes. He was a splendid man in 
appearance, with intelligence and energy strongly marked on 
his face. In Washington he was finely but not gaudily 
dressed ; but in Texas he usually dressed plainly. Again I 
saw him at the convention of April, 1833, in San Felipe, and, 
after its adjournment, traveled with him and a party of gen- 
tlemen to Brazoria. Among them were General Sam Houston, 
General John T. Mason, General Arnold, Samuel Sawyer, 
Captain Henry S. Brown, Thomas J. Chambers and Sterritt. 
who. I think was a brother-in-law of Bowie. Late in 1S35 I 
traveled with him from San .\ntonio to San Felipe, whither 4ie 
went on business with the provisional government. He was 
temporarialy adjutant-general of the volunteer army before 
San Antonio and was dispatched to the Rio Grande to burn 
the grass on the route to prevent the advance of the Mexi- 
can cavalry and lancers, a duty which he promptly performed. 
Our companions <•« ronU to San Felipe were Dr. Richardson, 
William (_;. Logan and another, whose name I have forgotten. 
[Captain Hotchkiss confirms the previous statements in rela- 
tion to the Natchez duel and continues :] Bowie was a very 
kind man, as his general conduct evinced. When he gave his 
friend his hand it was a pledge of fidelity never to be broken 
l)y him. It was generally said that he had been in several 
violent transactions, but not on his own account. But when 
he espoused the cause of a friend he would adhere to him 
to the bitter end, unless his confidence was betrayed. I 
do not know that he ever had a duel on his own personal 
account. He was a noble man, and I cherish his memory as a 
man of the strictest honor and a friend. 

Genereal J. E. Jefferson, of Seguin, Texas, says he 
knew Bowie in Natchez in 1829, traveled with him on 
steamboats and stopped with him at taverns ; that he 
stood high as a citizen and a gentleman ; that he was 
of incorruptible integrity, never violating plighted 
faith ; that he was not a professional gambler, though 
he and almost every one in that section, in those days, 
would ])lay poker and other games. He owned a fine 
plantation, called Sedalia, and negroes near Natchez, 
on the west side of the Mississippi. " Natchez under 
the hill," was then a sink of iniquity beyond realiza- 
tion at this day and gave, very unjustly, a bad repute 
abroad^ to the whole surrounding country. It was the 
gateway of the Howies from their home into Natchez 
and romance has connected their names with many 
affairs in it with which thev had no connection what- 
ever. 

Mr. William McCinley, of 1 )ouglas, Kansas, says 
that he once traveled in a stage-coach in company 
with lames Bowie, on the Cumberland road, across 
the Alleghanies. Besides them there were in the 
stage two men and a sick lady. The lady occupied 
the back seat, Bowie and McCinley the middle and 
the other two the front seat. [Henry Clay, of Ken- 
tucky, often told this story, as one of the other two pas- 
sengers.] No one knew Bowie, who was silent and 
muffled up in a cloak. The unknown man on the front 
seat began smoking a cigar. The lady politely 
requested him to desist as it made her sick. He 
replied that he had paid his money to ride in the coach 
and would smoke as much as he pleased. Bowie 
sprang up, drew a Bowie-knife from behind his shoul- 
ders, and holding it before the smoker, said, " I give 
you one minute in w^hich to throw that cigar away." 
It went overboard without awaiting the manner of its 
going. The knife was returned to its place and no 
further allusion made to the subject. Only at the 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



437 



next stand was Bowie's identity ascertained. It is 
well known that Mr. Clay often narrated this incident 
as an eye-witness, and that he had a great admiration 
for Bowie. 

.\ distinguished gentleman, well known to the writer, 
says that W. W. Bowie, a cousin of James, was one 
of the most profound jurists of Baltimore, and that, 
as a family, they all had talent, honor and fine cul- 
ture. But a few years since one of the family was 
several terms governor of Maryland, and that the 
memory of James Bowie should be rescued from the 
obloquy which, through ignorance and misconception, 
has attached to his name in the minds of many per- 
sons. This gentleman is a minister of the Gospel 
and a distinguished educator. 

Captain William G. Hunt, an old resident of Colum- 
bus, Texas, and a man of unsullied character, who 
came to Texas early in 183 1, first met Colonel Bowie 
and his wife at the house of his neighbor, Robinson, 
on Christmas of that year. Bowie and wife were 
en muff on a visit to Louisiana, and Mr. Robinson 
gave them a dinner to which the whole vicinity were 
invited. Mrs. Bowie was a beautiful Castilian lady, 
and won all hearts by her sweet manners. Bowie 
seemed supremely happy with and devoted to her, 
more like a kind and tender lover than the rough 
backwoodsman he has since been represented to be. 

On the 2 2d (jf February, 1881, there appeared in 
the San Francisco Chrunich- a communication in 
regard to Colonel Bowie, signed L. P. H., which 
bears ujjon its face such distinctive marks of per- ' 
sonal knowledge and candor that I transcribe the sub- 
joined extracts: 

The writer says : 

The account published in the Chroiiitli- of Febiu.iry 23, 
from the Philadelphia Times, of the •• invention of the Bowie- 
knife, and the duel in which it was first used," is incorrect in 
so many ])articulars that I feel constrained to write out a true 
history. I stood by the side of my father, among a number 
of the citizens of the city of Natchez, and witnessed the light 
in cpicstion, and am willing to make oath that everything here 
stated is strictly true : 

The Bowie brothers were natives of the slate of Maryland, 
of a respectable family, into which Reverdy Johnson, the great 
constitutional lawyer, married. They emigrated to .Mississippi 
in the year 1802 and engaged in the speculation of the rich 
cotton and sugar lands of that section. The staple of cotton at 
that period bearing almost a fabulous price gave great impetus 
to land mono]ioly, and the Mowie brothers found themselves 
confronted with another land speculating conipnny. of which 
the Judge t'rain mentioned in the article of the Philadelphia 
Tinns was the recognized head, both parties having a follow- 
ing of about seventy-five or one huntlred men each, all men of 
wealth and social position and all ''on the fight." The Bowie 
brothers were men of good jjhysical stature, sinewy and of a 
good, determined cast of countenance. Resin was the most 
considerate of the two. but James was brave to desperation. 
It was frequently remarked of him that he was a "stranger to 
the emotion of fear." They were both sportsmen — that is, 
they bet against the popular game of the day, faro, and played 
"brag." the twin brother to poker. Judge ('rain was chivalry 
personified. He had emigrated from South Carolina to Louis- 
iana. He was tall and strong, and wholly fearless, or seem- 
ingly so. 

Now, as to the fight on the sandliar opposite the city of 
Natchez. .-^ challenge to fight a duel had passed between Or. 
.AIaddo.\, of the Crain party, and Samuel Wells, of the Duwie 



party. .-Vccording to the terms of the fight neither Judge 
Crain nor James Bowie were to be present, because a deadly 
feud existed between them. Bowie doubted that Judge Crain 
would prove faithful to the agreement, and sent a courier to 
spy his actions. The parties to the duel met, but friends from 
the city of Natchez went over, and, through their InHuence, 
restored amicable relations. To cement these relations the 
parties sent across the river to Natchez for champagne, brandy 
and Havana cigars. Circled around a spring which flowed 
from the west bank of the river, all hostile feeling was swal- 
lowed up by the generous liquid, and everything was tinged 
with the rainbow hues of friendship, when Judge Crain put in 
an appearance. He, too, joined in the conviviality, pleased 
that no blood was to be shed, liut there was another ap]>ear- 
ance to be made before another hour passed. While thus 
pleasantly occupied a rustling was heard in the willow boughs 
that overhung the steep bank that led down to the spring, and. 
turning their faces, the manly form of James Bowie met 
their eyes. His appearance meant fight, and at it they 
went. Judge Crain was the first man who arose from his seat, 
and with his pistol shot Bowie, the ball passing entirely 
through his body, but failed to cut any cord which bound him 
to life. Bowie fell and Judge Crain, with the spear in his 
sword-cane, ran up and endeavored to stab him. Bowie skil- 
fully parried the thrust of the spear, and. collecting his ener- 
gies, reached up with his left hanil and caught bidge Crain bv 
the cravat, which, according to the fashion of the day. was tied 
securely around the neck. He drew him down close to his 
body, with his right hand secured the spear and ran it through 
his heart. Judge Crain dying upon the body of his prostrate 
foe, who meantime fainted from the loss of blood, .-^s soon as 
Crain discharged the pistol the friendly feeling which previously 
existed was dissolved quick as a snowflake falling on a heated 
furnace, and the friends of the two parties separated and com- 
menced firing on each other. Six were killed and fifteen 
wounded. The writer hereof takes pleasure in stating that his 
father was the first man who saiil: •• -Men, let us rush in 
between them and stop the fighting." 

James Bowie lay for months in his bed, in the city of 
Natchez, before he recovered from his wound. He was a man 
of much mechanical ingenuity, and while thus confined, whit- 
tled from a piece of white pine the model of a hunting-knife, 
which he sent to two brothers named lilackman. in the the city 
of Natchez, and told them to spare no expense in making a 
duplicate of it in steel. This was the origin of the dreaded 
Bowie-knife. It was made from a large saw-mill file, and its 
temper afterward improved upcm by an .Arkansas blacksmith. 
This is all that can be told about the Origin of that death-deal- 
ing implement. 

Since James Bowie became prominent in his efforts to 
advance the spread of republican institutions, ilr is proper to 
speak of what he did. He seemed to have a natural disposi- 
tion to protect the weak from the strong. .\t one time he was 
riding through the parish of Concordia. Louisiana, and saw a 
man lashing his slave with his whip. He told the man to 
desist, but he was met with curses. He dismounted from his 
horse, wrested the whip from the master and laid it over his 
shoulders. This led to a shooting-match, in which the slave- 
owner was badly wounded. Bowie, after submitting himself 
to the law. paid the doctor's bill, purchased the slave at double 
his value and gave him his freedom. 

At another time the son of William Lattimore. governor of 
the Territory of Mississippi, a religious gentleman of literary 
attainments, was sent by his father to the city of Natchez to 
sell his year's crop of cotton. The "ropers-in" of faro games 
made the acquaintance of the son, and induced him to jiatron- 
ize the game of a certain gambler named Sturdevant. " under 
the hill," at Natchez. The gambler soon had the proceeds of 
the crop, in bank bills in his possession. Bowie, who was 
standing by. a silent spectator, said to young Lattimore : " I 
know you; you don't know me, but your father does; stand 
here until I tell you to go." He then commenced betting at 
Sturdevant's game, and discovering an unfair turn of the cards 
told him sternly nul to attempt the cheat again. He shortly 



438 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



won bark the ai.nminl ymnig I.altiinore had lost, gave the j 
whole amount to him and tolii him never to gamble any more. 
This young Lattiniore assented to. and failhfidly did he keep 
his promise. 

This led to the light between Stmdevant and Bowie. The 
former hoping, it is presumed, to "bluff" Bowie, proposed to 
fight with knives, the left hand of each to be lashed together. 
Kesin Bowie proposed to take his brother's place, as the lat- 
ter had severely cut bis hand in butchering a deer a short time 
previous. This ]iroposition James Bowie indignantly rejected. 
The light took place and at tlie lirsl stroke Bowie disabled his 
antagonist, but magnanimously forebore to take his life. 

In after years a Methodist preacher told the writer this : lie 
said he was one of the first Methodist ministers sent to Texas 
by the Methodist Conference. He traveled on horseback, 
crossing the Mississippi river below Natchez ; that the first day 
after crossing the ilississippi river he was overtaken by a 
horseman dressed in buckskin, armed with rille. pistol and 
knife. They entered into conversation and he found him to be 
intelligent, pleasant and well acquainted with the geography of 
the country. Neither one inquired the name or business of the 
other. Both were aiming at the same destination. Texas. 
Finally they reached a new town filled with wild, desperate 
characters from other states. lie posted a notice that he 
would preach at the court house the first evening of his arrival 
there. At the hour named he found the rude structure 
thronged to overflowing — with men only. He gave out a 
hymn, and all joined in singing, and sung it well, but when he 
announced his text and attempted to preach, one brayed in imi- 
tation of an ass, another hooted like an owl, etc. He disliked 
to be driven from his purpose and attempted again to preach, 
but was stopped by the same species of interruption. He 
stood silent and still, not knowing whether to vacate the pulpit 
or not. Finally his traveling companion, whom he did not 
know was in the house, arose in the midst and with stentorian 
voice said: " Men, this man has come here to preach to you. 

You need preaching to, and Fll be if he shan't preach to 

you 1 The next man that disturbs him shall fight me. .My 
name is Jim liowie." The preacher said that after this 
announcement he never had a more attentive and respectful 
audience, so much influence had Bowie o\er that reckless and 
tlangerous element. 

I have thus sought, in the utmost good faith, with 
the Hniited means at hand, and very briefly, to present 
Colonel Bowie to those who live after him, .\s he 
w.AS — noble, gifted in person and mind — fearless, geii- ' 
erous and magnanimous — fervidly patriotic, overflow- 
ing with energy and enterprise — true in his affections, 



frank in his professions, an affectionate son and 
brother and a devoted husband. His foibles — vices 
if the term be preferred — were incident to the times 
and places in which he lived. Few around him, in 
all his manhood, were exempt from them in greater or 
less degree. But while he stood aloft, maintaining an 
unchallenged integrity, with tlie respect and admira- 
tion of the best, thousands fell liy the wayside. His 
name is forever linked with an immortal tragedy in 
the world's history, there to shine, as hero and patriot, 
till the genius of liberty shall retire into the caverns 
of darkness never to be pierced by the light of sun, 
moon or stars. Men may cease to venerate his mem- 
ory but VVOM.\N NEVER ! 

Of the Lieutenant-Governor Robinson mentioned 
in this sketch, may be added a few words: He came 
from Cincinnati to Nacogdoches in the winter of 
1834-5, an able lawyer and fine orator. He served in 
the first Consultation of 1835, was made lieutenant-gov- 
ernor in the provisional government till March, 1836, 
and in the fall of that year was one of the first four 
district a::d c.v officio supreme judges of the republic, 
resident at Cionzales, his district embracing all the 
country west of the Colorado. He resigned in Jan- 
uary, 1840, and ]jracticed law till 1849. He was 
taken jirisoner with the court, bar and citizens, in San 
Antonio, September 1 1, 1842, imprisoned at Perote, 
released by special order of Santa Anna, and reached 
home in Ajiril, 1843. In 1849, with his wife and 
only child, William, a boy then about twelve, he went 
overland to San Diego, California, where he died a 
few years later. In Arizona they were held in ca])- 
tivity several days by Indians and robbed, but not 
otherwise injured. During the late war William came 
back to Te.Kas and gallantly commanded a company 
in the Confederate army. Since then he has l)een 
sheriff and rejiresentative of San Diego county, and 
was living there when last heard from Judge Rob- 
inson often expressed his great admiration for Bowie 
as a wonderful and noble man. J. H. IS. 

Dallas, Texas, August ig, 1881. 



COLONEL GUSTAVE COOK. 



HOl'STOX. 



GUST.■^^"E COOK, was born in Lowndes county, 
.\labama, July 3, 1835. Nathaniel Cook, his 
father, was a nati\e of South Carolina, for twenty-five 
years judge of a circuit court in Alabama, a planter 
and slaveholder. His mother, Harriet .\nthony Her- 
bert, was the daughter of Thomas Herbert and Eliza- 
beth Hampton, of South Carolina. His father and 
mother were cousins, his ijaternal grandmother being 
Ellen Hamilton, daughter of ('aptain Hampton, who 
figured at King's Mountain, in South Carolina, dur- 
ing the Revolution. The family are related to Sena- 
tor Wade Hampton. His father is living with him at 
Houston, aged eightv-two. By both mother and 



father, he is related to General Phil Cook, now mem- 
ber of congress from Georgia, and to Colonel Hillary 
.\. Herbert, now member of congress from -Mabama. 
Walter, his oldest brother, was captain of a company 
in the Confederate service, and was killed at Chancel- 
lorsville, in 1863. (lirard, another brother, now a 
prominent lawver in Lowndes county, Alabama, was 
a caijtain in the Confederate army, in General Rhodes" 
brigade. 

Gustave Cook was not a studious boy, aiid was lit- 
tle inclined to either schools or books. .\t the age of 
fifteen he went to Texas alone, and had neither friend 
nor accjuaintance west of the Mississii)pi river. His 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



439 



uncle, lames R. ('oul<, was an officer in the Texas war 
for independence, and was killed in the service, in 
1836. His uncle's history induced (lustave to gratify 
his adventurous spirit by visiting the Lone Star .State, 
and his object was to be a soldier. He arrived in the 
state without money, but soon made aci|uaintances. 
.Among these were Three-Legged Willie, Ben .McCul- 
loch, Lamar, Burnet, .Sherman, the Baylors and Bur- 
lesons, with whom he became familiar and whom he 
adopted as models. He greiv up with the jiioneer 
Texians and imbibed their spirit and daring. 

At the age of eighteen, July 13, 1853, he married 
Miss Eliza Jones, daughter of Captain Randall Jones, 
a Texas veteran, of Fort Bend county. She was born 
in that county, in 1835. Her mother, Mary Andrus, 
was of a French family that moved from Louisiana to 
Texas about 1825. Four children were born of this 
marriage: Ida, born June 20, 1854, was educated at 
Mobile, and married, in Houston, January 27, 1880, 
Edwin Kyle, grandson of General Edward Burleson ; 
Mary Herbert, born November 4, 1856, and educated 
in Houston; Henrietta, born March 13, 1859, edu- 
cated in Houston; Custave, liorn January 24, 1867, 
destined for fine stock (arming. 

After his marriage, Mr. Cook educated himself. 
The text-books employed were a si)elling book, Col- 
burn's Aritli luetic. Hedges' Logic, and a We/>ster''s 
U)iahridged Dictionary. His favorite reading was 
the Spectator, the Federalist, Gil'/'ons Rome and 
Thiers' History of the French Revolution. The favor- 
ite poets of the young benedictine student were Scott 
and Burns. Under the advice of friends, he began 
reading law, in 1854. without a prece|)tor. But 
Judge John B. Jones kindly directed his legal studies, 
and he was admitted to the bar in 1855, and prac- 
ticed in the old Austin C'olony district LUitil the begin- 
ning of the civil war. 

In 1 861 he enlisted as a pri\ate in the Texas army, 
and was under Van Dorn in the capture of Federal 
troo])s and stores in that state. In the same year he 
became a private in Terry's Texas Rangers, (8th Con- 
federate cavalry,) and in this regiment was promoted 
successively to be sergeant, captain, major, Heutenant- 
colonel and colonel. He joined (ieneral .\lbert Sid- 
ney Johnston at Bowling (ireen, Kentucky, and 
remained with the army of Tennessee up to the sur- 
render, in 1865, and was with his regiment in over 
two hundred engagements ; among them, Woodson- 
ville, Shiloh, Perryvlllc, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, 
Resaca, Marietta, .\tlanta, Smithville, North Carolina, 
and Bentonville, in the same state. .\t Shiloh his 
right leg was broken by a musket ball ; at Farming- 
ton, Tennessee, he was shot, through the right arm 
and received a shot through the right hand that mashed 
every bone in it and has disfigured and almost totally 
disabled it; at Buckhead Church, Ceorgia, he was 
wounded by a Minnie ball through the right ankle, 
and at Bentonville he was shot through the right 
shoulder, the ball lodging in the rear of the lungs. 
Col. Cook received six or seven wounds during the 
war, and the scars he wears tell a tale of courage and 
gallantry and heroism far more elocpient than the 



praise of his biographer. He had voted for secession, 
and offered his life, if need were, to secure it. 

When Colonel Cook reached home at the close of 
the conflict, in 1865, he was a mere wreck, weighing 
only a hundred and eighteen ])ounds. Broken down 
in health, he was also bleeding from his wounds every 
hour of the day. Nor was this all ; he was ruined in 
fortune and was involved in an enormous debt, and he 
immediately prejiared to retrie\e the one and dis- 
charge the other, though the latter alone reipiired 
fourteen years. Colonel Cook resumed the practice 
of law at his old home, and continued there until his 
removal to Houston, in 1870, where he has since 
resided. In 1874 he was by CiovernorCoke appointed 
judge of the criminal court for the district of Gal- 
veston and Harris counties, which position, by 
reappointment of Governor Hubbard, he has e\er 
since held. 

Before Colonel Cook was twenty-one years of age, 
he was clerk of the district court of Fort Bend county 
for nearly a year. In 1856 he was elected judge of 
the county court of Fort Bend, and served two years. 
It was after holding these offices that he began the 
jiractice of law as a separate business and a sole means 
of maintenance. In 1872 he was elected a member 
of the thirteenth legislature of Texas. He has Ijeen a 
delegate from Harris county to every Democratic state 
convention up to the time of his assuming the duties 
of judge. He was a delegate to the Democratic state 
convention at Galveston in 1876, and opposed any 
action on the part of the convention looking -to the 
endorsement of the constitution then about to be sub- 
mitted to the peoiile. He was a delegate from Texas 
to the Pliiladelphia Peace Convention, in 1866. In 
politics, he has always been a 1 )emocrat of the states 
rights school, voted for secession, and fiivored the 
reconstruction policy of President Johnson. In the 
legislature, he opposed the land grant to the Texas 
and Pacific Railway Company. 

Judge Cook is a worthy member of the lipiscopal 
church, with decided tendencies to the Catholic faith, 
which his wife and two children have embraced. His 
eventful life and his frec]uent and almost miraculous 
escapes from death have attracted his attention to his 
relations to Deity and the dispensations of Provi- 
dence toward him. He makes no concealment of his 
devout gratitude to God for past preservation and 
present prosperity. The controlling principle of his 
life has been to do justice, love mercy, and walk hum- 
bly before God. From his mother, a woman of ex(|uis- 
ite beauty both of person and character, he learned 
to value truth and hate deceit. She taught him his 
religious duty, which he has never neglected. He is 
a devout and just man in every relation of life. 

Judge Cook is a Royal Arch Mason, and honors 
and jjractices the rules of the order. As an orator, he 
has but few equals in Texas, and as a jurist, no ^pe- 
rior. His legal opinions are eagerly sought and highly 
]irized. His charges to juries are brief, concise, clear, 
and embrace the legal points on which they are to 
decide. Dignity, uprightness and absolute justice 
characterize his actions on the bench. In social life. 



440 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



lie is very approachable, courtesy and affability being 
leading features of his admirable character. As an 
evidence of his legal learning and acumen, it can be 
truthfully affirmed that his decisions are always sus- 
tained and his judgments affirmed by the court of 
appeals, when appeals have been prosecuted. Since 
his ajipointment in 1874, but three of his cases have 
been reversed on appeal, and each of these on minor 
technical grounds. His knowledge is very extensive 
and his friends denominate him a living encyclopedia. 
Judge Cook is the opposite of avaricious. His 
opportunities to amass wealth have been excellent, 
but his boundless generosity and his indifference to 
tlie accumulation of riches have forbidden him to 
become wealthy. He regards pro])erty as a trust by 
the Creator, to be used in the relief of distress and in 
making others comfortable, rather than in the gratifi- 
cation of individual lusts and appetites. His daugh- 
ter, Miss Henrietta, is the financier of the family, man- 
aging the home business and directing the expendi- 
tures. He has a handsome cottage residence in 
Houston and a summer home in San Marcos, and 
besides owns several thousand acres of unimproved 
lands in Brown, Nueces and Hays counties, Texas. 
When voung Cook first came to Texas, his idea, as 



already intimated, was to take part in some of the 
numerous revolutions of Mexico, the leaders of which 
had their resorts along the Rio Crande, on the Texas 
border. These were lawless convulsions, the true 
nature of which he, being a youth of fifteen, did not 
clearly understand. But he sought counsel from 
those older and wiser than himself, and he was soon 
con\'inced that they presented no legitimate field for 
chivalric deeds and heroic achievements. Not reluc- 
tantly, therefore, he abandoned the idea of joining in 
these spasmodic upheavals and predatory revolutions. 
For two or three years he clerked in a drug store and 
became proficient in that line of business. This was 
the turning point in his life, and from the date of his 
abandonment of the boyish desire for adventure he 
began a life of usefulness, which is now crowned 
with honor. His aspirations since then have been to 
accomplish something in civil life worthy of his talents 
and of those relations he sustained to society. Exces- 
sively modest, and scarcely yet realizing that he has 
grown to manhood, he has achieved distinction with- 
out intrigue, and a high standing in public estimation 
without compromising his self-respect. He is justly 
regarded by his friends as a model of propriety, an 
honorable, useful and meritorious member of societv. 



COLONEL THOMAS JEFFERSON WARD. 

PALESTINE. 



THE subject of this sketch was born m Mount 
.'Mry, Surry county. North Carolina, on the 6th 
of February, 1805. His father was Colonel Thomas 
Adams Ward, a native of Charlotte county, Virginia, 
a land surveyor, of good education, who inherited a 
fine estate, but left little to his children. The father' 
of Thomas A., Captain Charles Ward, fell a martyr 
to liberty at the head of his company at the glorious 
battle of King's Mountain, South Carolina, October 
9, 1780. The mother of Colonel 'Fhomas J. Ward 
was Justiana, daughter of James and Jane Dickinson, 
of Scotch-Irish descent. Justiana was born in 
Patrick county, Virginia, in 1755. Colonel Ward's 
father was a kinsman of President John Adams, the 
successor of Washington ; but when he was in con- 
gress with Ex-President John (^uincy Aclams, in the 
absence of their family Bibles and records, they were 
unable to determine the exact degree of kinshi]). 
The Dickenson family furnished a number of promi- 
nent men in Virginia. 

Colonel Ward received but a limited education. 
In youth he was a store clerk, a school teacher, and 
then for three years a law student, and in due course 
adni^ted to the bar. In 1832 he was elected to 
represent his native county (Surry) in the legislature, 
and in the same year was colonel of militia. 

Having removed to Holly Springs, Mississippi, his 
name became famous from 1837 to 1839 by a contest 
for seats in the United States congress. Claihourne 



and (Jholson, Democrats, in August, 1837, had been 
elected by a general ticket to a called session of 
congress, and claimed seats for a full term. In 
November of that year the celebrated orator, Sargent 
S. Prentiss, and Colonel Ward, both Whigs, were 
elected for a full term and claimed their seats. After 
a full discussion, in which, by the permission of the 
house, Prentiss made one of his grandest oratorial 
efforts- — a speech that made his name national— the 
house referred the matter back to the people of Mis- 
sissippi for a new election. Prentiss and Ward 
re-entered the field. Gholson declined, and his place 
was filled by James Davis, afterwards of Texas and 
commander of a body of volunteers at Eipantlitan, 
west of the Neuces, in a battle against the Mexicans 
under General Canales, in June, 1842. Cieneral 
Davis was afterwards a member of the Texas senate, 
and was the father of Captain A. J. (Jack) Davis, 
a former citizen of Tyler and Cleburne, but now of 
west Texas. Prentiss and Ward were elected over 
Claiborne and Davis, and served out the unexpired 
term of the twenty-fifth congress. Colonel Ward 
then ranked as a states rights Whig, and in later 
years, on the demise of his party, consistently and 
naturally became a states rights Democrat, where he 
has ever since stood as immovable, figuratively 
speaking, as the rock of ages. 

Colonel Ward has been married three times. His 
first wife, united to him in 1887, at Holly Springs, 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



569 



soldier, always at his post of duty and was wounded 
March 8, 1864, at the battle of Mansfield. In 1873 
he was elected city marshal of Marshall, on the Dem- 
ocratic ticket. He is a Royal Arch Mason, a Knight 
of Pythias, a Knight of Honor and an Odd Fellow. 
He is a man who is genial, generous and kind ; a 
good citizen and a warm friend. 

Dudley Smith Jennings, jr., was born November 
15, 1847, in Jackson, Mississippi, came with his 
parents to Texas, and was married November 17, 
1873, to Miss Carrie M., daughter of Josiah Mar- 
shall, deceased, of Marshall, Texas. They have one 
child, a son named Marshall, born November 14, 
1876. Mr. Jennings is an Odd Fellow and a mem- 
ber of the order of United Workmen. He is located 
at Longview, Texas, where he practices law and has 
served as mayor and justice of the peace for several 
years. Politically, he is a Democrat, religiously, a 
Baptist. 

Robertus Love Jennings, the business manager of 
the firm of Jennings Brothers, was born in Jackson, 
Mississippi, October 18, 1849. He is emphatically 
the carver of his own fortunes ; having risen to posi- 
tions of trust and honorable responsibility from hum- 
ble beginnings. He is almost exclusively a business 
man, is possessed of fine administrative abilities and 
indomitable energy. He has a most generous dispo- 
sition, his heart is full of kindly impulses and he 
never fails his friends in any emergency. He is a 
Master Mason, a Knight of Honor, a United Work- 
man, in which order he has passed all the chairs, an 
ex-chief of the Marshall fire department, and was 
elected alderman by the Democrats in 1868. He 
married Miss Susan Belle, daughter of John H. Duke, 
of Red River county, Texas, December 29, 1869, and 
they have three children : Robertus, born May 30, 
187 1 ; Mary Susan, born August 4, 1877, and Rowley 
William, born December 21, 1880. 

Mrs. Jennings is earnest in all good works, an 
affectionate wife and mother, a woman of natural 
grace and refinement of maner, a capable house 
keeper and domestic in all her tastes. Mr. Jennings 
attributes his success in life to the helping hand of 
his judicious wife. 

John Alexander Jennings was born in Harrison 



county, Te.xas, July 18, 1853. He is numbered 
among the substantial business men of Longview, 
Texas, where he is engaged in the drug business. 
He is a Master Mason and a member of the Ameri- 
can Legion of Honor. 

James Johnson Jennings, the junior member of the 
firm of Jennings Brothers and foreman of the print- 
ing department of their pul)lishing house, was born in 
Harrison county, Texas, February 12, 1856. He is 
a modest, unassuming gentleman, whose sterling 
worth, promptness and faithfulness will insure suc- 
cess in whatever department of life his energies may 
be called forth. 

The name of Hon. Dudley Smith Jennings stands 
pre-eminent among the lawyers of his day. He stood 
in the front rank of his profession. Educated in a 
school where patient investigation and careful ana- 
lysis were required, where he must measure strength 
with men who had a national reputation, he attained 
a high degree of intellectual excellence. He was a 
logical reasoner and sought to fathom the philosophy 
of law. As a public speaker he commanded atten- 
tion by his candor, sincerity of manner and real 
ability. His style was marked by its chastity, feli- 
city of diction, clearness, directness and force, 
added to which w^as a commanding presence and 
a dignified liearing. 

A leading lawyer says of Judge Jennings: 

As a jurist, he was one of the great men of the state and 
the South ; and his talents were never so conspicuous as when 
forced to the highest mental effort by formidable opposition. 
He belonged to that class of intellectual men who go to the 
bottom of all questions, and exhaust the subjects they investi- 
gate and discuss. He was a representative man of that class, 
of which our free institutions have presented so many brilliant 
examples. 

Wedded to his profession, he esteemed its honors 
as sufficient reward, and, refusing political prefer- 
ment, established a reputation which was in itself 
a distinguished honor. Generous in his disposition, 
intellectual in his tastes, philanthropic in his hfe, he 
dedicated himself, with a singleness of aim and a 
fidelity of purpose, to a life which enlisted all the 
talents of his educated manhood. Socially he was a 
genial companion, devoted to his friends and his 
family, and in all the relations of life a noble man. 



HON. THOMAS J. JENNINGS. 

FORT WORTH. 



THE subject of this sketch was born in Shenan- 
doah county, Virginia, on the 20th of October, 
1 801. His parents were Colonel William Jennings 
and Marian Howard Smith. Colonel Jennings, for a 
number of years, was sheriff of the county, was a man 
of fine social qualities and universally esteemed. 

When the subject of this sketch was about ten years 
old his father moved to Indiana, where he purchased 
five thousand acres of land at a [)oint on the Ohio 

7-J-T 



river near Vevay. He remained there but a short 
time, when he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and 
purchased a large portion of the land upon which the 
city is located, which he afterwards sold for a sum 
which at this day appears insignificant. 

After a short residence at Louisville, Colonel Jen- 
nings removed to Christian county, in that state, 
where Thomas J. Jennings was engaged in clerking in 
a country store and going to school until he was 



570 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



about seventeen years old, when he commenced 
teaching school. After teaching two or three years 
he accumulated sufficient means to attend Transylva- 
nia College, at Lexington, Kentucky, where he grad- 
uated, in 1824, with the highest honors, having been 
selected by his classmates to deliver the valedictory. 
Jefferson Davis, late president of the Confederacy, 
Gustavus H. Henry, of Tennessee, and a number of 
other men that afterwards became distinguished in 
law, medicine, politics and the ministry, were his 
classmates. The love he acquired for the classics at 
Transylvania College clung to him through life, and 
he never lost an opportunity to cultivate them. 
There was, perhaps, no more accurate or critical 
Latin and Greek scholar in the South, but his acquire- 
ments were not confined to Greek and l^atin, for he 
was thoroughly familiar with the French and Spanish 
languages, speaking them both with the ease and 
fluency that he did his own vernacular. After gradu- 
ating he taught school a short time at Paris, Tennes- 
see, studying law at the same time. Soon after being 
admitted to the bar, he went into partnership with his 
brother, Dudley S. Jennings, and they practised at 
Paris about two years, when they dissolved partner- 
ship and the sul)ject of our sketch commenced prac- 
ticing at Huntington, Tennessee, in partnership with 
Berry Gillespie. In 1836 he went to Yazoo City, 
Mississippi, and did a large and lucrative practice 
there until the spring of 1840, when he moved to 
Texas, first settling at San Augustine, remaining there 
until the fall of that year, when he went to Nacog- 
doches. 

In January, 1844, he married at that place Mrs. 
Sarah G. Mason, the only daughter of Major Hyde, 
a prominent citizen of Nacogdoches and formerly a 
leading merchant in Nashville, Tennessee. Mrs. 
Mason was highly educated, had been raised with 
great care and tenderness, was a lady of excellent 
sense, of rare literary attainments and universally, 
admired for those qualities which adorn her sex. 

While residing at Nacogdoches he was in partner- 
ship, successively, with J. M. Ardrey and W. B. 
Ochiltree, both of whom were eminent lawyers in 
their day and time. 

In 1852 he was elected attorney-general, and on 
the expiration of his term, in 1852, was re-elected 
and held that position till 1856, when he declined a 
re-election. 

In 1856 he removed to his plantatation, near Alto, 
in Cherokee county, Te.xas. 

In 1857 he was elected to the legislature from 
Cherokee county. In 1861 he was elected to the 
convention that passed the ordinance of seccession. 
In the fall of 1861 he had a stroke of paralysis, which 
confined him to his bed eighteen months, and he 
never in after life recovered from the effects of it. 

In the fall of 1864 he removed to Tyler and went 
into partnership with B. T. Selman. In 1868, 
having dissolved partnership with Colonel Selman, he 
and his son, Tom R. Jennings, formed a partnership. 
Colonel Jennings continued actively in the practice 
until 1875, when, owing to his advanced years and 



failing health, he retired from the practice, having 
practiced law steadily and uninterruptedly for half a 
century. He had, at different times, iieen in partner- 
ship with George F. Moore, late chief-justice of the 
supreme court ; Stockton P. Donley and Reuben H. 
Reeves, late associate justices of the supreme court. 

In 1877 he removed to Fort Worth, Texas, where 
he died, after a long and painful illness. September 
23, 1881. He had three sons: Tom R., Monroe D. 
and Hyde Jennings. His oldest son, Tom R. Jen- 
nings, is practicing law at Nacogdoches, Texas. 
Monroe D. died when nineteen years old, at Alto, in 
Cherokee couuty, in September^ 1868. His youngest 
son, Hyde Jennings, is a leading lawyer at Fort 
Worth. His faithful wife resides with her son, Hyde, 
at the same place. 

Colonel Jennings was a Mason and Odd Fellow, 
and, while not a member of any particular church, 
lead an honorable life, conspicuous for its virtues. 

Among the public men that have adorned the his- 
tory of Texas, there w'as not one that possessed in a 
more marked degree those qualities of mind and 
heart that challenge admiration. In his investigations 
he was LUitiring. He mastered every question he 
endeavored to discuss. His speeches were clear, for- 
cible and logical, and when he concluded the court 
and jury were impressed with the conviction that he 
had exhausted the subject as viewed from his stand- 
point. Socially, he was amiable, kind and generous 
to a fault. He was brave, high-toned and honorable, 
loving virtue for itself. His sense of justice, liberality 
and kindly feeling were displayed in his regard for 
others. Of this the writer of this sketch had an 
example in 1857. Colonel Jennings was then a mem- 
ber of the legislature, and, upon being drawn out as 
to his opinion of the leading men of the state, took 
them up, seriafum, dwelling upon the excellent quali- 
ties — nientally, morally and socially — of each. Such 
a thing as jealous rivalry never had a place in his 
mind, and he was never known to speak disparagingly 
of any one. As a man, he possessed those qualities 
which endeared him to every one; as a jurist, he .was 
able and profound, and, as a politician, he was patri- 
otic. Few men were g.s well informed in regard to 
public affairs, and none more useful and generous in 
the discharge of every duty. Public wellfare always 
found in Colonel Jennings a friend. He was a friend 
to the friendless, a helper of the needy. As a man 
with the best interests of his community at heart, he 
was ever ready with his purse and his influence to 
assist whatever project was inaugurated calculated to 
help the masses, and it is but natural that such a man 
must ever be missed by those who knew him best. 
The task of writing a fitting memoir of one who, for 
so long a time figured conspicuously in all the affairs 
of interest to Texas and the general government, is 
not an easy one, and in the foregoing sketch of the 
life of one of the noblest sons ever born unto Texas, 
it has been intended to give only that part of Colonel 
Jennings' history that will prove useful to the future 
generations of men. This book is not wanting in 
information from which those intending; to make the 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



571 



science of the law a study, can glean useful points to 
shape their course of life by ; so, also, may the young 
merchant, needing some life that has been a success 
in its career to fashion his own by, come to these 
pages and draw all the inspiration his imni^ination 
may reciuire. This is a work written and published 



with this object in view — to educate the future. " The 
hves of great men all remind us " that we of to-day 
should do something to be remembered by the young 
and old of to-nioirow, and this effort has been made 
in the production of the Encyclopedia of the lives 
of the men and women of the present generation. 



GENERAL THOMAS J. RUSK. 

NACOGDOCHES. 



I HAVE been requested by the publishers of The 
Encvci.opedia of the New West to write a sketch 
of one of the most distinguished citizens Texas ever 
had, and one of the most elegant men and sincere 
])atriots that ever sat in the American senate. The 
duty is encompassed with difficulties, from the fact 
that I never lived in the locality of General Rusk, 
know little of his genealogy and only knew him 
through his admirable career as a citizen, a soldier 
and statesman of Texas. 

This, however, is known, that he was born in 
South Carolina, in Pendleton district, December 5, 
1803, the son of a worthy Irish stone-mason — that he 
early attracted the attention of John C. Calhoun, 
under whose counsels he was educated and studied 
law. He then settled in Georgia, stepped at once to 
the head of the bar, married an accomplished daugh- 
ter of General Cleveland and came to Nacogdoches, 
Texas, in the winter of 1834-35. Then as now, the 
people of Texas cared not whence a man came nor 
how long he had been here, in the estimation of his 
mind and worth. 

No people under the sun have ever existed more 
generous and liberal in regard to length of resi- 
dence or nationality in birth, in the judgment of men, 
than the people of Texas, from its .\nglo Saxon birth 
in 1821 to date. Compared with the early settlers of 
New England, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland, 
the contrast is so great as to demand the verdict of 
impartial philosophy in its solution. Old Texians 
are proud of the fact, but have no theory for its solu- 
tion. They instinctively know it as a truth and 
behold nothing strange in it. They — the real Tex- 
ians — are unaware that it is iieculiar and distinctive. 
It is only appreciated by the ever-incoming tide of 
immigrants and travelers. But that it is a fact, none 
who have a right by observation to judge, will deny. 
Hundreds of illustrations could be given strikingly 
demonstrative of the fact, but space forbids. 

Rusk, a young man of tall and commanding pres- 
ence, of dark complexion, tinged with a roseate hue, 
of deep set and benevolent eyes, manly and kindly 
features, beaming with nobility of soul, came to 
Nacogdoches a young stranger in search of a home 
and fortune but a little before the relations of Texas to 
Mexico assumed portentous shape. A single glance 
at his splendid presence won every heart, and the 
whole people took him on trust. While yet a 



stranger, unknown to himself and alone by the instinct 
of the old municipality of Nacogdoches, he was a 
leader of the people on the doorstep of a bloody 
revolution. 

The convention which declared Texas an indepen- 
dent Republic, met at Washington, on the Brazos, 
March i, 1836. Rusk was there as a delegate 
from Nacogdoches and his name is affixed to the 
declaration. Thence, till his death in 1857, his his- 
tory is so much of the history of Texas, and insep- 
arable from it. 

By David G. Burnet, the president (/(/ interim from 
March to October, 1836, he was made secretary of 
war ; but chanced to be in and win laurels at the bat- 
rie of San Jacinto. When General Houston retired 
early in May, in search of medical treatment in New 
Orleans, Rusk was made commander-in-chief of the 
army, and, at its head, followed the retreating Mexi- 
cans to Goliad. There he called a halt — caused the 
bones of Fannin's four hundred and eighty massacred 
men to be collected and interred, and over their grave 
delivered an address which moistened the cheeks of 
every man in that motley group of half-naked, half- 
starved and illy-armed volunteer soldiery. 

For a few months he remained in command of the 
army ; then returned to his home in Nacogdoches, 
where he was elected to the first congress of the 
newly-born Republic. By that body he was elected 
a brigadier-general of the RepubHc and as such in 
October, 1838, fought and defeated a large body of 
Indians at the Kickapoo village in East Texas. 

In July, 1839, he commanded a portion of the 
troops in the Cherokee battles of July 16 and 17. In 
the same year he was elected by congress chief 
justice of the supreme court of the Republic and held 
the first term at Austin in the winter of 1839-40. 
Under the Republic the chief justice and the district 
judges composed the supreme court. He held the 
position for a time — then resigned and devoted him- 
self to the practice of law, in which he had but a 
single rival in East Texas, in the person of his friend. 
General J. Pinckney Henderson. He loved the free- 
dom of retirement and had no taste for office-seeking 
or the mysticisms of political life. But in 1845, when 
the convention was called to form a constitution for 
Texas as a proposed state of the Union, General 
Rusk was unanimously elected a delegate from 
Nacogdoches. \\'hcn the convention assembled on 



572 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



the Fourth of July he was unanimously elected its 
president, and when the legislature, under the new 
constitution, assembled on the i6th of February, 
1846, he was elected by the unanimous vote of both 
the senate and house, to be one of the two first 
senators from the state of Texas to the congress of 
the United States, his colleague being General Sam 
Houston. In 1843 he had been elected major-gen- 
of the Republic. 

Together, they took their seats in March, 1846 — 
together, by the re-election of each, they sat eleven 
years, till the melancholy death of Rusk in 1857. 
Together they represented the sovereignty and 
defended the rights of Texas — together they shed 
lustre on their state — together they sustained Presi- 
dent Polk in the prosecution of the Mexican war — 
together they, each for himself, declined a proffered 
major-generalship in the army of invasion into Mex- 
ico — together they labored to give Texas the full 
benefit of her mergence into the Union in regard to 
mail routes, frontier protection and custom house 
faciUties — together they labored in behalf of the com- 
promises of 1850, the adjustment of the boundary of 
Texas and sale (as a peace offering,) of our North- 
west territory to the United States — and together 
they sought to encourage the construction of a trans- 
continental railway, on the parallel of thirty-two 
degrees north latitude from the Mississipp river and 
the Gulf of Mexico, through Texas, to the Pacific 
ocean — an achivement cemented in victory yesterday, 
December i, r88i, twenty-four years after the death 
of Rusk and eighteen years after the old hero of San 
Jacinto closed his eventful career. 

For several years General Rusk was elected to the 
honorable position of president pro few. of the United 
States senate and presided with a dignity and impar- 
tiality that commanded the respect and esteem of 
every member of that body. 

In I854, with a select band of friends, he traversed 



Texas from east to west on the parallel of thirty-two, 
to see for himself the practicability of a railway route 
and became thoroughly satisfied of its feasibility 
and cheapness, as he was already of its untold bless- 
ings in the progress of civilization in America and its 
mighty influence on commercial intercourse between 
the continents of Europe and Asia. He was a wise 
man in his day and generation ; a just man in all the 
relations of life ; a patriot as pure as the dews of 
Heaven ; a husband and father tender to weakness ; 
a friend guileless and true ; an orator persuasive and 
convincing : a soldier from a sense of duty, in battle 
fearless as a tiger ; in peace gentle as a dove ; ambi- 
tious only for an honorable name, honorably won, 
but regarding as dross the tinsel, display and pomp of 
ephemeral splendor. In a word, Thomas J. Rusk 
was a marked manifestation of nature's goodness in 
the creation of one of her noblest handiworks. 
When he died Texas mourned from hut to palace, 
for the whole people, even the slaves, wherever 
known to them, loved him. 

Would that I could reproduce a few sentences from 
the eulogy upon him by that peerless son of Texas, 
the late Thomas M. Jack, before a weeping audience 
in Galveston ; but my copy of it is among the treas- 
ures lost in the late war. 

Fidelity to truth bids the statement — so painful to 
a whole commonwealth- — that this noble citizen, pat- 
riot and statesman, died by his own hand, at his own 
home, in Nacogdoches, in the summer of 1857. 

His cherished and adored wife, to whom he was not 
only attached with rare devotion, but for whom he 
had a reverence as remarkable as beautiful, had died 
a little before. His grief, quiet but unappeasal)le, 
superinduced melancholy. A ravenous carbuncle, at 
the base of the skull, racked his brain, and in a 
moment of temporary aberration, to the amazement 
of his household, his soul went hence to a merciful 
God. I. H. B. 



ONE HUNDRED OLD TEXIANS. 



IN PREPARING the following brief notice of over 
a hundred persons, nearly all deceased, who fig- 
ured usefully and most of them with more or less dis- 
tinction in the earlier days of Texas, bre\'ity has been 
demanded to the utmost extent consistent with an 
intelligent glance at the character of the party and the 
services rendered. The compend has been chiefly 
made from memory, which must, of necessity, be 
occasionally at fault. The Hst could be extended did 
space and time permit. To a considerable extent it 
embraces persons who have received no notice in 
other works, but who deserve mention in a labor of 
this kind. This is wholly disconnected with the regu- 
lar biographical sketches otherwise appearing in The 
Encyclopedia, prepared from data furnished by 
others. It is a labor of love, resting upon its own 
merits. T- H. B, 



Archer, Branch T., one of the ablest, most elo- 
(juent and purest patriots Texas ever had, was born 
of an ancient family in Virginia, received a medical 
education in Philadelphia — served in the Virginia leg- 
islature as sijeaker of the house — came to Brazoria, 
Texas, in 1831, and was a master spirit in the revolu- 
tion. He was president of the first general consulta- 
tion (convention) in 1835, one of three commissioners 
with Stephen F. Austin and William H. ^\'harton to the 
United States in 1835-6 — a member of the congress 
in 1836, and speaker at the session of 1837 — secretary 
of war under President Lamar in 1840 and 1841, and 
died in the family of Mrs. William H. Wharton, in 
Brazoria county, September 23, 1856. He was 
remarkably tall, of dark complexion, deep set eyes, 
finely arched brows, and a man of commanding pres- 
ence, distinguished as an orator and loved fur the 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



573 



nobility of his nature. Archer county perpetuates his 
name. His only child, Dr. Powhatan Archer, stood 
high in Brazoria as a physician and gentleman and 
died in the Confederate army. 

Andrews, Robert, a courageous young man of 
good family, the only Texian killed in the brilliant 
repulse of the Mexicans at the '• Mission of Concep- 
tion," October 28, 1835. Andrews county, adjoining 
the southeast corner of New Mexico, was named in 
his honor. 

Alex.\nder, Rev. Robert, a man of six feet two, 
came from Tennessee, a young Methodist preacher in 
1837. Of limited education, but fine presence, he 
grew in mental power by laborious study, and speed- 
ily became, long to remain, a pillar of the church to 
which he belonged, honored and respected by the 
members of all other denominations. As a boy of 
those primitive frontier days, listening to his dis- 
courses in cabins and under arbors — then meeting 
him in manhood — remembering his lifting me, an 
invalid, faint on horseback, into his buggy, during the 
late war and conveying me many miles to the family 
I had not seen in eleven eventful months, and knowing 
his long and useful career in the field of his labors — 
it is meet that he should have a place in this list of 
worthy benefactors, so we raise his name from its 
tomb of oblivion. 

B.^KER, Rev. Daniel, D. D., a native of Virginia, 
distinguished as an evangelist in the Presbyterian 
church, known from Pennsylvania to Texas, and one 
of the most remarkable pulpit orators of the country. 
He visited Texas when it was a Republic and made a 
decided impression, adding to the church numbers of 
men of wealth and education, their sons and daugh- 
ters. He returned in 1848, becoming a citizen. He 
was made president of Austin College, a Presbyterian 
institution at Huntsville, now at Sherman. He 
was a remarkable man, of great power. He died on 
a visit to Austin in behalf of education, during the 
session of the legislature in the winter of 1857-8, and 
was buried with distinguished honors. 

BouRLAND, Colonel James, came from Kentucky 
to Northeast Texas about 1840. He was a represen- 
tative man of the intelligent and progressive South- 
west — a clear-headed, frank, hospitable and very 
courageous man — fond of the sports peculiar to his 
time and section, but ever reverencing the institutions 
of religion and the precepts of his pious parents — 
one of those men who, like Bowie, seemed destined 
to be misunderstood and misrepresented by casual 
observers. He located on Red river and was sent to 
the first senate of the state after our annexation to the 
United States and ser\ed four years. Afterwards he 
opened a plantation, established a trading house in 
the horseshoe bend of Red river, in the extreme 
northeast corner of Cooke county, where, for many 
years, he established a beneficient influence over the 
Chickasaw Indians. When William C. Young raised 
a regiment for the Mexican war, of which he was 
elected colonel, Mr. Bourland was elected lieutenant- 
colonel, and his brother, William Bourland, major. 
But the war closed about the time thev reached the 



Rio Grande and they never participated in any bat- 
tle. In the late civil war James Bourland commanded 
a regiment whose duty it was to protect the North- 
western frontier against the hostile Indians in the 
darkest day ever known in that region. He performed 
that onerous duty with a fidelity and success that 
saved the lives of thousands of women and children. 
The country was not only endangered by the forays 
of wild savages, but a home organization — as in 
South Carolina during the Revolutionary war — who 
sought to plunder and burn the houses of the people. 
Their plots were discovered and a number of the 
guilty hung. In after years, when Colonel Bourland 
was on his death-bed, a Texian paper had the indeli- 
cacy to so connect the name of Colonel Bourland 
with that transaction as to style him " the hangman of 
Texas" — a great wrong on historic truth. Space for- 
bids a statement of the facts; but throughout that 
grave and solemn occasion, from first to last, the con- 
duct of Colonel Bourland was that of a brave, con- 
scientionus man, and he saved the lives of several 
guilty persons, because of their youth or for the sake 
of their families. It was a terrible ordeal — just such 
as often happened in the war of 1776 — and stern 
necessity, under the law of self-protection, demanded 
examples to be made ; but none more than Colonel 
Bourland sought to limit the punishment within the 
narrowest possible bounds. He sleeps in an honored 
grave and will ever be revered by those who know his 
true character and career. 

Bourland, Major WilHam, a brother of James — 
the first county clerk in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 
came to Texas about the same time as his brother — 
was a representative in the first legislature of 1846, 
from Lamar county, and several times afterwards from 
Grayson — a major in Young's regiment in the Mexican 
war, and generally a man of sterling worth. Having 
married Miss Willis, an educated lady of the Chicka- 
saw Nation, he removed into that territory, opposite 
the horseshoe bend of Red river, and died just 
before the late war. The family of Bourland is 
numerous in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississijipi, Mis- 
souri and Texas, and has ever stood as honorable and 
patriotic. 

Bell, Mrs. Mary E., the young bride of Josiah 
H. Bell, {nee Miss McKenzie), of Kentucky, arrived 
on the Brazos early in 1822, and, the same year, 
became the mother of the second child born in Austin's 
colony. This was in Washington. They soon settled 
in Brazoria county, where her second son, Hon. 
James H. Bell, was born. He was in the Somervell 
expedition, educated at Yale College, elected district 
judge in 1856, and to the supreme bench in 1859, 
the first native of the state so honored. The only 
other child of Mr. and Mrs. Bell became the accom- 
plished and estimable wife of Dr. J. W. Copes. Mrs. 
Bell was a remarkable woman to be found in a wilder- 
ness — educated, refined and deeply imbued with 
religious convictions — a devoted member of the Pres- 
byterian church. Her example and influence ever 
had a wholesome effect on those in the circle of her 
acquaintance, which, for years, covered the whole 



574 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



country. She assisted in founding the first Sunday- 
school in Texas, in 1828. Her house was the home 
of preachers and missionaries, without reference to 
their denominations, and the first men of the land 
were proud of her acquaintance. Through all the 
hardships of a wilderness life, Indian wars and the 
revolution, unto the day of her death, before the late 
war, she remained the same consistent, gentle, persua- 
sive Christian woman. The name of her husband is 
inseparably and honorably connected with the history 
of Austin's colony, and her memory is emljalmed in 
every loving heart whose possessor knew her. 

BONNELL, George W., a native of Onondaga 
county, New York, a man of good education and a 
fluent newspaper writer. He early removed to Ala- 
bama, editing papers at Selma and Mobile, also in 
Columbus and Aberdeen, Mississippi. In 1836 he 
came to Texas — was major in the volunteer service 
and commanded a batallion in an Indian expedition 
in 1S38, but had no fight. He also edited a paper in 
1838-9 in Houston, and through i84oand 1841, con- 
ducted the Texas Scntinelm Austin, the first number 
being issued in January, 1840, on which were employed 
Joseph A. Clark, (now of Thorp's Springs, Hood 
county), William Clark, (deceased in Houston about 
1850), John Henry Brown, (now of Dallas), and 
Martin Carroll Wing, in 1843, one of the seventeen 
decimated Mier prisoners. The .S'c«//;/c/ was the sec- 
ond paper in Austin, being preceded a few weeks by 
the Austin City Gazette, owned by Samuel Whiting, 
and edited by George K. Teulon,an Enghshman, who 
died in China, as an American consul. On the 
Gazette were employed Judge Joel Miner, Alexander 
Area, William B. McClelland, W. D. Mims and other 
printers. Major Bonnell was a chivalrous, impetuous 
man, of small, lithe stature, red hair and sparkhng 
t'ray eyes — unselfish, generous and loved by his asso- 
ciates. He was on a commission, early in 1839, to 
the hostile Comanches, high up the Colorado. Hti, 
also wrote a small volume, now out of print, descrip- 
tive of Texas. In 1842 he joined the Somervell expe- 
(jition — was one of the guard on the east bank of the 
river, when the Texians surrendered in Mier, and, with 
a Mr. Hicks, was the last to seek safety in flight, 
waiting till the last moment to assist across the river 
any who may have escaped. They left only on the 
appearance of Mexican cavalry on the opposite side ; 
but were captured ten miles out and carried back. 
Reaching the river at twilight. Hicks escaped into the 
chapparel, and finally reached home and made this 
statement to the writer of this. That was the last ever 
heard of Major Bonnell. who was doubtless killed on 
the escape of Hicks. In his honor, in 1838, General 
Edward Burleson bestowed the name (yet retained) of 
Bonnell on the now pleasant resort and beautiful 
mount four miles above Austin. He had no kindred 
in Texas, but is fondly remembered by many who 
knew his worth and his intense patriotism. 

Burnet, David Gouveneur, was born in Newark, 
New Jersey, the youngest son of Dr. William Burnet, 
April 4, 1789 — received a superior education, served 
as a lieutenant in the Miranda expedition to South i 



America in 1806 — spent nearly two years in 18 17- 18 
with the Comanche Indians in Texas — made his home 
in Texas in 1826 — served in the convention of 1833 — 
was elected the first president ad interim of the 
Republic, serving from March 18 to October 22, 1836 ; 
elected vice-president, serving from December, 1838, 
to December, 1834, part of the time acting as presi- 
dent. His last public service was as secretary of state 
under the first governor, J. P. Henderson, in 1S46-7. 
He was preceded to the grave by his noble wife and 
all of his children, his last son, as a Confederate 
major, being killed in the battle of Mobile. He died 
in Galveston, in 1871, honored by all Texas. He 
was elected to the United States congress in 1866, 
but not allowed to take his seat. Under the Mexi- 
can government he was a district judge. In politics 
he was simply a Texian — in religion, by inheritance 
and practical life, a Presbyterian. Burnet county per- 
petuates his name in the geography of the state. 

BoNHAM, James Butler, a heroic son of South 
Carolina, forever linked with the history of Texas, 
from having entered the Alamo, seven days after the 
siege began, witl^ a detachment of thirty-two men 
from Gonzales, each of whom added one to the list of 
immolated martyrs. Bonham, in F'annin county, was 
named for him at its birth about 1838-9. 

Brown, Captain Jeremiah, an officer of the Texian 
navy, a native of the North, who won a strong hold 
on the people of Texas. He lived at Brazoria. 

Brown, Captain William, a brother of the fore- 
going, a brave naval officer. 

Brown, Colonel Reuben R.,a Georgian, one of the 
few who escaped from the massacre in the Johnson and 
Grant expedition upon Patricio, in the winter of 
1835-6 — a brave and intelligent man, who settled at 
the mouth of the Brazos after the revolution, and was 
a colonel in the Confederate army during the late war. 

Brown, (Jeorge William, a brilliant young lawyer 
■from Henrico county. Virginia, who settled at Colum- 
bus, was United States district attorney, a member of 
the convention of 1845, and died of consumption in 
the dawning of a brilliant career in 1847. 

Brown, Captain Henry S., born in Madison county, 
Kentucky, March 8, 1793, (six days after the birth of 
Sam Houston, in Rockbridge county, Virginia), went 
to Missouri in 18 10, was a soldier in the war of 181 2- 
15, came to Texas in 1824, was a soldier and often a 
captain on the Indian frontier, a captain at Velasco, 
June 26, 1832, and died in Columbia, Brazonia county, 
(uly 26, 1834. The first congress of Texas held its 
session in a house built and owned by Captain Brown, 
and in which he died. Brown county, created in 
1856, twenty-two years after his death, was named 
for him. 

Brown. John, (known in his day as Waco Brown), 
born in Madison county, Kentucky, came to Texas 
with his lirother, Henry S., in 1824, was captured by 
the Waco Indians, in the spring of 1825, escaped from 
them in August, 1826, met his brother Henry at San 
Felipe, who pursued the band from which he escaped, 
and killed sixteen of the seventeen Indians composing 
the party, on the head of Cummins creek, in what is 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



575 



now Fayette county. .Subsequently John settled as a 
merchant in partnership with Cajitain Philip Dimmitt, 
in San Antonio, and died there Decemlier 8, 1831. 

Bro\v.\, Dr. Caleb S., brother of Captain Henry S. 
and John, born in Madison county, Kentucky, in 1805, 
came to Gonzales, from Mississip])i, in May, 1840, was 
surgeon at the battle of Plum creek, August 12, 1840, 
and Salado, September 18, 1841 — a lion-hearted man 
in danger, gende as a lamb in peace — noble, generous 
and benevolent. He died in February, 1855, leaving 
a widow and one infant daughter. 

Brown, Captain Nicholas, half-brother of the three 
preceding, born in Madison county, Kentucky, left 
motherless in inf^mcy, came to Texas from Mississippi, 
captain of a company of volunteers in 1836, after- 
wards a merchant at Rodney, Mississijipi, returned to 
Texas in 1847, commanded an overland company to 
California in 1849, commanded in a fight with the 
Indians on the Stanislaus river, in the winter of 1849- 
50, accumulated a fortune in mercantile pursuits at 
Stockton, was burnt out, losing eighty thousand dollars, 
and again returned to Gonzales, Texas. He died of 
yellow fever, on a business trip to Brownsville, in 
1864, leaving no descendant — a modest, honest and 
brave man, named for an older half-brother, who was 
killed in Dudley's defeat, opposite Fort Meigs, in 1813. 

BucHEL, Colonel .\ugustus, a native of Prussia, 
educated in military schools, was a lieutenant in the 
Prussian army but resigned, served in the armies of 
Turkey and Spain, and arrived, still a young man, in 
Indianola, Texas, in 1845. He commanded a three 
months' company under General Taylor, in Mexico, in 
1846, which, being discharged, he served with distinc- 
tion on General Taylor's staff at Buena Vista. He 
commanded a splendid Texas regiment in the Confed- 
erate army, rose rapidly in public favor, and fell in a 
desperate charge at the head of his regiment at Mans- 
field, in A[iril, 1864, de])lored by the whole army. He 
was interred, with marked honors, in the state ceme- 
tery at Austin. He was a man of remarkable polish, 
extreme modesty, and as noble as he was l.irave. 

Blair, Rev. William C, a native of Ohio, and a 
soldier throughout the war of 181 2-15, long resident 
near Natchez, Mississi])pi, where he married, came to 
Victoria, Texas, a missionary of the Presbyterian 
church, in 1839. He was a preacher for fifty years — 
a man of superior mind and education. He was 
prominently identified with the struggles of his church, 
especially in Southwest Texas, till his death in Port 
Lavaca, in 1872, when about eighty-five years of age. 
He was a man of singularly happy endowments in 
social and domestic life, given to generous hospitality 
and always an instructive conversationalist. His 
widow died in Lexington, Kentucky, September 7, 
1881. 

B.abbitt, General Edwin B., United States army. 
Though never a citizen of Texas, this honored and 
revered gentleman and soldier, was so long on duty 
in our state, and so endeared to our people wherever 
known, that he deserves a place in this connection. 
He was a native of Mas.sachusetts, as was his noble 
.and beloved wife, who was a sister of General Sprague, 



of the United States army. He was long stationed 
as quartermaster, first at San Antonio, and then for 
several years at Indianola, whence, before the war, 
he was transferred to Baltimore, and thence to the 
Pacific coast. Since being on the retired list, he 
resided in Pordand, Oregon, where he died in 1880. 
He was, in the highest sense, a religious man, devoted 
to good deeds, conscientious, dignified and exceed- 
ingly affable, and his family were worthy of such a 
husband and father. His eldest daughter, Fanny, 
become the widow of Lieutenant Barber, a few weeks 
after marriage in Indianola. Laura, is the wife of 

Colonel , of the army, and her twin-brother, 

Lawrence, is an officer in the same. Though a 
thorough Union man. General Babbitt stood ready to 
renew his old Southern friendships as soon as the 
last gun was fired. 

BuNTON, John W., came from Tennessee to Texas, 
in 1833, landed in Brazoria, setded at Bastrop, signed 
the declaration of independence, was a soldier of San 
Jacinto, a member of congress in 1836 and 1837, 
served in numerous expeditions against the Indians, 
finally settled in Hayes county where he died three or 
four years ago, leaving a handsome estate. 

Carl, Rev. Daniel, a Methodist preacher from 
Tennessee, in 1837, long labored on the frontier and 
served in several Indian and Mexican campaigns as a 
soldier, noted for coolness, courage and a high sense 
of duty, always respected and esteemed, even by the 
wildest young men of the border. He was a welcome 
guest in every household, regardless of creed, and 
exercised a wide and beneficial influence till retired 
from ill-health. He was a man of strong, logical 
mind, and at times reached the higher plane of oratory. 
He died at his home in Victoria county, (])0ssibly in 
the edge of De Witt), several years ago, leaving a 
widow and several children. 

Call.\han, Captain James H., a Georgian, one of 
the few who escaped from Fannin's massacre, long a 
brave defender of the frontier and in many fights. He 
commanded a company in the retreat from San 
Antonio, March 6, 1842, another in the battle of 
Salado, September 18, 1842, and led three companies 
in October, 1855, across the Rio Grande, in pursuit of 
the Kickapoo Indians, who had been depredating in 
Texas. A bloody fight occurred near San Fernando, 
in which he was confronted by superior numbers, but 
succeeded in falling back and recrossing the river. 
His bearing commanded the warmest commendation 
of his men, made up of the most daring spirits of the 
Southwest. He lonii; resided in Seguin, but died in 
Hayes county, in 1856. Callahan county was named 
in his honor. 

Cai.der, Robert J., came from Maryland in 1832, 
commanded a company at San Jacinto, has been 
sheriff and county judge of F"ort Bend county, where 
he still resides, a planter and a man honored and 
respected for the attributes of a gentleman, a soldier 
and a good citizen. 

Chalk, Whitfield, a North Carolinian, who came 
to Texas in 1839. He, and a man named St. Clair, 
were the only ones who escaped at the time of the 



576 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



surrender at Mier, Christmas day, 1842. In the con- 
fusion they burrowed under a pile of ground sugar 
cane, in a back yard, remained till night and suc- 
ceeded, with great suffering for food and sore of foot, 
in reaching Texas. A quiet, honest man, now residing 
at Lampasas. His brother, Ira \V. Chalk, is a Meth- 
odist preacher. 

CoLENiAN, Captain Robert M., a native of Christian 
county, Kentucky, a man of courage and enterprise, 
settled at Bastrop, on the Colorado, about 1830, and 
was in numerous campaigns against the Indians — a 
captain in 1835, against the Tehuacanos, under 
Colonel John H. Moore, and a captain at San Jacinto. 
He also signed the declaration of independence. He 
was drowned in the mouth of the Brazos in 1837. 
His home, in Webber's prairie, above Bastrop, was 
attacked by a large body of Indians in 1838, and 
heroically defended by his widow and a son of thirteen 
years, both of whom were killed and a smaller son 
carried into cajjtivity never to be recovered. Two 
httle girls, secreted by their mother under the 
puncheon floor, were rescued the night following by 
the brave and afterwards eloquent and distinguished 
young lawyer, JohnD. Anderson, who served in the 
constitutional convention in 1845, and died in Guada- 
lupe county in 1848. Coleman county was named as 
a memorial of this valiant pioneer. 

Clay, Nestor, an early immigrant from Kentucky, 
a man of splendid talent, who won distinction among 
giants in the provincial convention of 1833, and died 
before the revolution of 1836. His brother, Tacitus, 
and kindred resided, and the survivors yet reside, in 
Washington county. He was a cousin of the brothers 
Sidney, Cassius M. and Brutus J. Clay, of Kentucky, 
and a second cousin of the great statesman, Henry 
Clay. 

Caldwell, Colonel Matthew, (commonly called 
" Old Paint," from the spotted color of his whiskers), 
came early from Kentucky, where he was born i;i 
1798, to DeWitt's colony, and at once became a 
prominent defender of the frontier. He was in a fight 
with the Indians at the head of the San Marcos in 
the spring of 1835. He was a soldier in 1835-6, a 
quartermaster part of the time. He signed the 
declaration of independence. He was a captain in 
the regular army from 1838 to 1841 ; but commanded 
one wing of the citizen volunteers at the battle of 
Plum creek, August 12, 1840. In 1841 he was a 
captain in the celebrated Santa Fe expedition, which 
was betrayed and captured near Santa Fe, imprisoned 
in the City of Mexico about a year and released. He 
reached home barely in time to be elected colonel 
commanding the citizen volunteers in the victorious 
battle of Salado, September 18, 1842 — two hundred 
and two Texians against one thousand four hundred 
Mexicans. He died at his old Gonzales home in 
January, 1843, lamented as one of the noblest patriots 
of the country. Caldwell county was named for him. 

Caldwell, Colonel Pinkney, was a soldier of repute 
in the revolution and a man of talent. He was killed 
by the Indians in their raid on Victoria, August 7, 1840. 

Caldwell, John, came from Tennessee to the 



Colorado in 1830. He became a wealthy planter and 
was long in public life. He entered congress in 1838 
and was many years a senator — a man of fine, prac- 
tical sense and irreproachable character. He died a 
few years since, leaving a large estate and numerous 
family. 

Cocke, James D., a lawyer and printer, from Rich- 
mond, Virginia, gallant and chivalrous, a Mier pris- 
oner, who drew a black bean in the lottery of life as a 
Mier prisoner, and was shot to death by the famous 
order of Santa Anna, in April, 1843. 

Cooke, James R., one of the bravest of the brave, 
of Tennessee lineage, but from Alabama to Texas, a 
cavalry lieutenant at San Jacinto, a daring soldier on 
the Indian frontier, and a colonel in the Somervell 
expedition to the Rio Grande in 1842. On horseback 
one of the finest looking men Texas ever had, in 
person of commanding presence. In heart, one of 
the noblest of men. In voice, in battle array, a second 
Roderick Dhu. A man of the forest, loved and hon- 
ored for the chivalry and nobility of his nature. He 
lost his life in a personal difficulty about the last days 
of March or the first of Aj)ril, 1843, deplored by a 
whole commonwealth. 

Cooke, William G., a druggist from Richmond, 
Virginia, to New Orleans, whence, in 1835, he came 
to Texas as lieutenant of the New Orleans Grays, the 
first company that ever came from the United States 
to the relief of Texas. He was at the storming of 
San Antonio, afterwards quartermaster-general of the 
Republic, in 1841 a commissioner in the ill-fated 
Santa Fe expedition — long imprisoned in Mexico — on 
the staff of General Somervell in 1842, married an 
accomplished young daughter of Don Luciano 
Navarro, and died in 1847. Cooke county is named 
for him. 

Cooke, Louis P., born in Tennessee, entered West 
Point Military Academy — expelled before gradua- 
tion — came to Texas from New York in the More- 
house expedition, arriving just in time to miss the 
batde of San Jacinto ; lieutenant-colonel in the 
army of 1836-37, member of congress from Brazoria 
in 1838-39, secretary of the navy under President 
Lamar from 1839 to 1841, a wild, courageous and 
somewhat reckless man, had an eye shot out by an 
Indian arrow near Corpus Christiin 1845, and died of 
cholera at Brownsville in 1849. His brother. Dr. 
Wilds K. Cooke, was a senator from the Robertson 
district, in the first legislature after annexation ; and 
another brother, H. W. Cooke, of Coryell, was a cap- 
tain on the frontier in 1859. Louis P. Cooke was an 
extraordinary man. His history, life and death 
abound in romance, a romance of courageous reck- 
lessness, clouded by actions in contrast with his 
otherwise admirable character. 

Cottle, George Washington, one of a large family 
who came from Lincoln county, Missouri, to Gonzales, 
Texas, between 1826 and 1830. His head-right 
league covers the head spring of the Lavaca river, on 
or near which is the new railroad of Flatonia. He 
entered the Alamo during the seige, with the chival- 
rous Bonham, and there lost his life to his country, for 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



577 



which, forty years later, his name was bestowed on 
Cottle county, on Pease river. He has a large 
kindred, of various names, yet in the state. 

Darnell, Nicholas H., born in Tennessee in 1806 
— served in the Florida war — came to San Augustine, 
Texas, in 1838 — in the Cherokee battles of 1839 — 
served in congress from 1841 to 1845 — was speaker 
of the house — in the convention of 1845 and chosen 
by that body to carry the authenticated constitution to 
President Polk in Washington city. He removed to 
Dallas about 1858 — was a captain on the frontier in 
i860 — represented Dallas county in the legislature of 
1859-60 and called sessions of 1861, at the time of 
secession — was colonel of the i6th cavalry in the 
Confederate army — served in the constitutional con- 
vention of 1875 irom the district of Dallas, Tarrant 
and Ellis, with John Henry Brown from Dallas and 
J. W. Ferris from Ellis — also in the legislature of 
1874-75 from Tarrant. He has ever stood as an 
honarble and patriotic man of good talent and fine 
practical judgment, and now resides in Fort Worth, 
seventy-five years old, feeble in health, respected as 
a patriarch who has been ever faithful to his country. 

De Leon, Don Martin, the founder of Victoria 
and De Leon's colony in 1824, under the coloniza- 
tion laws of Mexico, was a native of the Canary 
Islands, settUng first in the state of Tamaulipas — a 
man of very stern character, but honorable principles. 
He died of cholera in 1834. His son, Fernando, was 
commissioner of the colony to issue titles — a man of 
integrity, who left Texas during the revolution, but 
returned in 1845 and died before the late war. Syl- 
vester, another son, was alcalde, a brave and gener- 
ous man, greatly esteemed by the Americans. One 
of Don Martin's daughters was the wife of Captain 
Placido Venibedes, a brave Indian fighter and strong 
friend of the Americans, who, with his brother-in-law, 
Sylvester De Leon, was murdered by Mexican rob- 
bers on the Nueces in 1837. Another was the wife 
of General Jose M. J. Carbajal, since long known as 
a general in the pronunciamentos and revolutions by 
the Liberal or Republican party in Northern Mexico. 
General Carbajal was educated by, and a protege of, 
the celebrated Alexander Campbell, of Bethany, West 
Virgina, in whose religious doctrines he was a 
strong believer. During the French intervention in 
Mexico, General Carbajal rendered signal service to 
his country against the invaders, mention of which is 
made in the memoir of General Lew Wallace, in this 
work. 

DiMMiTT, Captain Philhp, came from Kentucky 
in the early years of colonial Texas — was a mer- 
chant in San Antonio prior to the revolution — a cap- 
tain in command of Goliad after its capture in Octo- 
ber, 1835 — figured as a trader on the Mexican border 
and in military expeditions. He acquired a large 
estate in lands, and died a prisoner in Matamoros in 
1841, leaving a widow (a Mexican lady) and several 
children. 

Duval, John C., one of the few prisoners who mir- 
aculously escaped from the Fannin massacre at Goliad 
in 1836. He is a man of education and Hterary 

78 -T 



tastes and a fine surveyor. His brother. Captain 
Burr H. Duval, was murdered at the time of his 
escape. Another brother, Thomas H. Duval, was 
United States district judge of Texas from 1856 till 
his death in Austin in 1S78. Their father, William 
P. Duval, was a native of Virgina — a member of con- 
gress from Kentucky, whence he was appointed gov- 
ernor of Florida by President Jackson, and finally 
died in Austin, Texas. John C. Duval is yet living, 
unmarried. 

Darden, Stephen H., a native of Mississippi — 
served in the Texian army of 1836 — in the legisla- 
ture from Gonzales in 1853-55-57 and 1859 — 
entered the Confederate army as captain in the 4th 
regiment in Virginia — was wounded and disabled — 
came home and served in the last term of the Con- 
federate congress. From 1874 to 1880 he was 
comptroller of the state — declined a fourth re-elec- 
tion and now resides in Austin. He is annointed in 
the estimation of all who know him as an honest, 
brave, generous and kind-hearted man, of fine intel- 
ligence and clear head. 

Eldridge, Joseph C, came from Connecticut to 
Texas in 1837, with his brother, John C. Both 
filled several positions under the government and 
were esteemed valuable men wherever tried. Joseph 
C. was commissioner of Indian affairs and the head 
of the party in 1843 that advanced into the hostile 
country as peace- proposers, the incidents of which 
are given in the memorial of general H. P. Bee and 
referred to in the sketcli of the Torrey brothers. 
After annexation he was appointed a paymaster in 
the United Stales navy, residing in Brooklyn, New 
York, and held that position till his death in 1880. 
They belonged to an ancient and well-known New 
England family. 

Flaco, war chief of the Lipans, was one of the 
most remarkable Indians in our history. He was 
born a warrior and became a chief before arriving at 
manhood. The Lipans were kindred of the Mes- 
caleros of Mexico and hved in that country more or 
less. After 1836 they chiefly lived in Southwest 
Texas, somewhat in union with the friendly Tan- 
cahuas. Their principal chief was Colonel Castro, 
who carried about his person a colonels commission 
from President Sam Huston, and an older one as a 
brigadier-general in the Mexican army. He died 
about 1841, having led his band of scouts often with 
the whites. He was with Colnel John H. Moore in 
his expeditions in 1838-39 and 1840, in which young 
Flaco took part. Flaco was often, also, west with 
Hayes who held him in great esteem. In the Som- 
ervell expedition in 1842 ihe commanded a few of 
his warriors, acting with Hayes who commanded the 
advance. On the Rio Grande he dismissed all of his 
people, excepting an old deaf and dumb man, tell- 
ing them to gather up plenty of Mexican horses and 
come home, which they did. He and this old man 
remained and came in with the party remaining with 
General Somervell, after the Mier separation. On 
leaving the Rio Grande, in conjunction with a man 
named Rivas and a Mexican he gathered and brought 



578 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



in sixty or seventy Mexican horses, on the principles 
of equal partnership. Arriving at San Antonio with 
the troops, these four encamped a few miles out with 
their animals. While asleep Flaco and his com- 
panion were murdered by the other two, who drove 
their horses into East Texas and Louisiana. Some 
days elapsed before the outrage became known — the 
disbanded volunteers had gone home — and the vil- 
lains had gone east with none to pursue. It was 
generally the most dismal hour the country had ever 
seen, following the disaster at Mier, and, while indig- 
nation filled every breast, the murderers escaped 
unwhipped of justice. The Lipans could understand 
no explanation, and from that day to this, from their 
resumed haunts in Mexico, have been the enemies 
and the slayers of our frontier people, regardless of 
age or sex, though of late years rendered compara- 
tively powerless. Flaco was then but twenty-four, 
over six feet in height, of manly form and the finest 
horseman I ever saw. But for that horrible crime, 
imagination can scarcely comprehend the anguish 
and the horrors, since experienced on that frontier, 
which would never have had existence. What 
became of the despicable wretches is not known. 

Fisher, William H., from Richmond, Virginia, of 
good education, very tall and slender, came to Texas 
in 1834, — was in the Indian battle in the cedar 
brakes of the San Marcos, in April, 1835 — a captain 
in the battle of San Jacinto — secretary of war in 
Houston's first term — a colonel in the Republican 
army of Mexico, in 1839-40 — a captain in the Somer- 
vell expedition of 1842, and, after the separation of 
the command elected colonel of the three hundred who 
remained on the Rio Grande, fought the battle of 
Mier and became prisoners. He was a prisoner 
twenty-two months and released with the last of his 
comrades. He returned home in the winter of 
1844-45, married a charming lady and died in Gal- 
veston in 1845. He was an accomplished gentlemaii. 

Fisher, John, a brother of William S., settled in 
Gonzales in 1834 — signed the declaration of inde- 
pendence and served in the army of 1836. His fate 
is unknown to the writer ; but he was an educated, 
courageous and gentlemanly man. 

Fisher, Samuel Rhoads, a native of Phila- 
delphia, went in early life to St. Louis, Missouri, 
thence to Texas. He was a prominent man in Aus- 
tin's colony, resident in Matagorda — signed the dec- 
laration of independence — secretary of the navy 
under President Houston and lost his life in a per- 
sonal encountre in 1839. 

Hill, George W., a man of fine ability, long resided 
at the frontier town of " Old Franklin," in Robert- 
son county, and took an active part in the defense of 
the country. He served repeatedly in congress, was 
a member of President Houston's last cabinent and 
long in the state senate, always wielding an influence 
for the public good — a really valuable man in his day. 
Hill county was named for him. He died in the 
prime of life, before the late war, at his home, Spring 
Hill, in Navarro county. 

Hood, General John B., a native of Kentucky, 



educated at the United States military academy — 
served in the army as a lieutenant and was stationed 
on the Texas frontier, where he established a stock 
farm or ranche and was greately esteemed by the 
people. He claimed Texas as his home. He entered 
the Confederate army as colonel of the famed 4th 
Texas infantry in Virginia, and rose rapidly to be a 
brigadier, then major-general and lieutenant-general. 
He won the highest distinctions in the battles of Vir- 
ginia — lost a leg at Chickamauga, and continued to 
ascend the ladder of fame till placed in chief com- 
mand of the Army of the Tennessee, in place of 
Hon. Joseph E. Johnston. Then followed the 
campaign into Tennessee, with the sanguinary 
battle of Franklin, his defeat before Nashville and 
retreat. These events are matters for military criti- 
cism. But for undaunted spirit and personal hero- 
ism, by common consent. General Hood ranks second 
to no man in either army. His death in New Orleans, 
with that of his wife, leaving eleven little children, 
including three pairs of twins, called forth a burst of 
sympathy honorable to our country. 

Helm, Major George, came from Kentucky to 
Texas, a passenger on the scooner, " Only Son," from 
New Orleans, landing in Matagorda bay in February, 
1822. He selected land on the Colorado and was 
about returning for his family when he suddenly died. 
His family remained in Kentucky. One of his sons 
became governor of that state. Another is the Rev. 
Samuel Larue Helm, D. D., an eminent Baptist 
divine of Louisville. 

Hawley, Rev. John L., came from Philadelphia 
to Southwest Texas in 1847, suffering with consump- 
tion. He was an accomplished scholar and captiva- 
ting orator. He read law under Vice-President 
George M. Dallas and entered upon a splendid prac- 
tice, but abandoned it to become a minister in the 
Presbyterian church. Neither the genial climate nor 
the gentlest care of newly made Texas friends afforded 
permanent relief, and he died in New Braunfels about 
1850, deplored as a man of pure heart and remark- 
able talent. His widow and infant son, John Mar- 
shall Hawley, returned and took up their abode in 
Germantown, Pennsylvania. 

Johnston, General Albert Sidney. The life of this 
eminent man, in two large volumes, from the pen of 
his accomplished son, Colonal William Preston John- 
ston, has so recently been given to the public that 
we are content to say he was a Kentuckian, educated 
in the Unitted States military academy at West Point, 
at the same time as several others who became dis- 
tinguished on both sides in the late civil war. As a 
lieutenant in the United States army he served in the 
Black Hawk war with Jefferson Davis. He resigned 
in 1835-36 — offered his sword and hand to Texas — 
became first adjutant-general in 1836, then com- 
mander-in-chief till the disbandment in 1837, sec- 
retary of war under President Lamar, serving in 
1838-39 and 1840, was wounded in the Cherokee 
battles of 1839, commanded a Texas regiment in the 
beginning of the Mexican war in 1846, and, after its 
disbandment, served on the staff of General Taylor at 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



579 



Monterey and Buena Vista. By President Polk he 
was re-appointed as a major and paymaster in the 
United States army, subsequently made colonel of 
one of the new cavalry regiments, commanded as 
brevet-brigadier-general the Utah expedition, win- 
ning distinction, and when the late war began, being 
in California, he resigned, joined the Confederacy and 
was appointed one of the full generals of its army, 
second only in rank to the highest. He organized 
the army at Bowling Green, Kentucky, retreated 
before Buel and fought the battle of Shiloh, April 6 
and 7, 1862, where he was killed on the 6th, under 
circumstances illustrative of his chivalrous character. 
General Johnston ranks in our history, by the con- 
sent of eminent commanders on both sides of the 
struggle, as one of the ablest military chieftains yet 
produced in the United States. But he occupies 
a yet higher place in the hearts of the people, especi- 
ally those of Texas, based upon his exalt d personal 
worth. No man who ever held an American commis- 
sion, either in civil or military life, stood more spot- 
less before the world. His name is ever spoken with 
respect, admiration and affection. His widow, a lady 
of rare excellence, still resides in CaKfornia where 
the war of 1861 found her ; but in every Texas house- 
hold she has an abiding place. 

Jones, William E., a lawyer and planter, with his 
parents, brothers and sisters, came from Georgia to 
Texas in 1839, chiefly settling in Gonzales county, 
though he subsequently resided in Seguin, New 
Braunfels, in the mountains of Kendall county, and 
died in Georgetown in 187 1 or 1872, while judge of 
that district. He had served in the Georgia legisla- 
ture and was editor of the Augusta Chronicle and 
Sentinel. He was elected to the Texas legislature in 
1841 and again in 1842, but, in September of the lat- 
ter year, was captured with the court and others to 
the number of about fifty-three, and carried to the 
City of Mexico. In 1843 he was released at the 
intercession of his old friend, General Waddy Thomp- 
son, then United States minister, and, on reaching 
home, again elected to congress. By that body, at 
the session of 1843-44, he was elected district judge 
and served by re-elections under the Republic and state 
some ten years. He returned to the bench in 1870 
and died as stated. Under the Republic, as district 
judge, he was also a member of the supreme court. 
He opposed annexation to the United States in 1845 
and secession from them in 1861, but ever retained the 
pubHc confidence from the acknowledged sincerity of 
his character. He commanded a company through- 
out the war for the defence of the frontier on which 
he lived. He was a fine scholar and writer and an 
impressive orator, always conservative and logical. 
Of a large family of brothers and sisters, but one sur- 
vives, Mrs David E. Smith, of Gonzales. 

Kleberg, Judge Robert, came from Germany to 
Austin county, Texas, in 1834, and was a soldier in 
the battle of San Jacinto, a man of fine mind and 
good education, ever esteemed as a worthy citizen. 
In 1846 he settled in DeWitt county, of which he was 
long chief justice and in which he still resides, 



nearly eighty years of age. His sons, Marcellus 
E. Kleberg, of Galveston, served in the legislature of 
1873, after graduating from Washington-Lee Univer- 
sity, and Rudolph Kleberg, of Cuero, are both law- 
yers and young men of fine promise. The old patri- 
arch has given all his children fine educational oppor- 
tunities and may well feel, surrounded by a popula- 
tion holding him in the highest respect and esteem, 
that his half century of Texas life has not been in 
vain. 

Kerr, James, born in Kentucky, September 24, 
1790, removed to Missouri in 1808, was sheriff, repre- 
sentative and senator, and came to Texas in February, 
1825, settled as surveyor at Gonzales, laid off that 
town, was broken up by the Indians July 3, 1826, 
then settled on the Lavaca, surveying lands in the 
colonies of DeWitt and De Leon. He was in the 
convention of 1833, a soldier in 1835, member of the 
provisional government, elected to the convention but 
did not sign the declaration, because escap- 
ing with his family. He served in the congress 
of 1838-39 and held various public trusts. He was 
a man of susperior practical talent and exercised 
great influence for good. He died December 23, 
1850. 

Kent, Andrew, came with his family, in 1828, from 
St. Charles county, Missouri, to what is Lavaca 
county, his head-right league being on the river of 
that name. He entered the Alamo, with Bonham, 
through leaden rain, there to die for Texas, for which 
Kent county perpetuates his name. 

Karnes, Colonel Henry W., came to Texas from 
Tennessee in 1831, a brave, enterprising pioneer, won 
distinction in the storming ot San Antonio, December 
5 and 10, 1835, commanded the scouts on the retreat 
of General Houston, fighting the Mexican advance on 
the Navidad, was captain of cavalry at San Jacinto, 
commanded in several Indian battles, 1836 to 1840, 
was a prisoner in Matamoros in 1836, a prisoner 
among the Comanches in 1837 or 1838 and died 
while rapidly in rising fame, with the rank of colonel, 
in San Antonio, in December, 1840. Karnes county 
was named for him in 1853. 

Linn, John J., the elder of four broters, (Charles, 
Henry and Edward), was born in Ireland about 1802 
and brought by his parents to New York in infancy. 
His parents, brothers, sisters and himself came from 
New York to Victoria, Texas, in 1830. The brothers 
were Mexican traders, ("harles and Henry died in 
Mexico before the revolution. Edward at Goliad since 
the late war. John J., the only survivor of that once 
influential family has lived in Victoria fifty-one years. 
He was a soldier in 1835 and a member of the pro- 
visional council in 1835-36, a member of congress in 
both 1837-38 and 1838-39, long mayor of Victoria, a 
leading merchant for many years, and ever a man of 
integrity and influence. He married Miss Margaret 
Daniels, an accomplished young lady of New Orleans, 
who yet survives and beloved by all yet spared who 
knew her in those dismal days. His first child was 
born on the day of San Jacinto, under a friendly Mex- 
ican roof, but inside the enemy's lines, while he was a 



58o 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



refuge from his young wife in the army. He was ever 
faithful to his country. 

MiL.A.M, Colonel Benjamin R., an unlettered native 
of Kentucky, was a volunteer in the patriot army of 
Mexico during the revolution against Spain, left the 
country in disgust when Iturbide was proclaimed 
emperor, entered Texas at an early day, obtained a 
colonial grant, was imprisoned in Mexico through 
jealousy of the Centralists in 1834-35, escaped in 
1835, joined the army the night Goliad was captured, 
October 9, 1835, and on the fifth night of December 
led the storming columns into San Antonio. He glori- 
ously fell on the eighth, two days before the surrender 
of the Mexicans, under General Martin Perfecto de 
Cos. Milam county preserves his name. 

Menefee, William, came to Texas m the winter of 
1829-30, from Tuscumbia, Alabama, though a native 
of East Tennessee. He was a substantial planter on 
the Colorado in what is now the upper part of Whar- 
ton county, a man of fair English education, of vast 
inteligence acquired by self-culture and a fine public 
speaker, a patriot by nature, inheritance and parental 
training, and a most valuable man in the pubKc 
service. He served in the consultation of 1835, in 
the provisional council, signed the declaration of inde- 
pendence, served in the Te.xian congress throughout its 
existence and several times in the legislature, and 
died in Fayette county in 1876. He was one of a 
large kinship who came to Texas together, embracing, 
besides his own name, those of Southerland, White, 
Heard, Devers and Rogers, who settled in 1830, 
some on the Colorado, but chiefly on the Navidad, in 
what is now Jackson county, and became known as 
the " Alabama " settlement, to which reference is 
elsewhere made. Here I will say, once for all, that 
they were plain, practical, liberty-loving, honest Meth- 
odist people, with an injection of bainism through 
various marriages. A better average kindred, so 
numerous, never came to Texas, speaking as one who 
knew them in his youth and knows the survivors unto 
this day. 

Menefee, John S., nephew of William and son of 
Thomas, (a plain farmer), a man of good education 
and fine mind, a soldier in 1835 and at San Jacinto, 
a true soldier, who fought under a sense of duty to 
his country, but, outside of war, was too tender 
hearted to shoot at a deer or turkey for food, without 
shutting his eyes and asking for forgiveness. In the 
great invasion of 1840, as one of three scouts, he 
became isolated and had a single handed combat with 
a warrior on the Arenoso, in Jackson county. He 
received seven arrows into his body, at last threw his 
empty pistol between his antagonist's eyes, hid under 
the creek bank, and, after a day of bleeding anguish, 
walked and crawled to the nearest ranche, bearing 
in his hands the seven arrows which he had 
pulled from his body and which he yet has in his 
Jackson county home. Otherwise he has been county 
clerk, county judge, a member of congress in 
1839-40, and generally a benafactor to those among 
whom he has lived fifty-one years. 

Morehouse, General Edwin, a native of New York, 



removed first for a number of years to Clarksville, 
Pike county, Missouri, to Texas in 1826, in 1835-36 
brought out a battalion from New York, but landed 
too late to be in the battle of San Jacinto, though in 
hearing of the guns, commanded a regiment till the 
disbandment in May, 1837, served in the first senate 
of 1836-37, elected brigadier-general of mihtia in 
1838-39, commanded a fruidess expedition up the 
Brazos in 1839, died in Houston in 1849. His brother, 
Dickerson B. Morehouse, of Galena, Illinois, was 
long a well-known steamboat captain on the Upper 
Mississippi. 

Miller, Dr. James B., a talented physician from 
Lexington, Kentucky, came to Texas before the rev- 
olution and was political chief of the Brazos before 
that event, a senator of the Republic and held various 
prominent offices. He was universally popular as a 
man of talent, honor and kindness of heart, and died 
at Richmond, on the Brazos, in 1854. 

Moore, Dr. Francis, jr., a native of Steuben county, 
New York, highly educated, a fine writer and geolo- 
gist, who accidently lost an arm in his youth. From 
1836-37 to about 1850 he was editor of the Houston 
Telegraph, senator from 1839-40 to 1841-42, long 
mayor of Houston, state geologist in 1859 and i860, 
and died while on a visit in Philadelphia, in 1864. 
He was a fine orator, a sincere Presbyterian and one 
of the purest men in the country, in whose nature 
patriotism was a passion. His widow and children, 
at last accounts, resided in Philadeljihia. 

McKiNNEV, Thomas F., a native of Kentucky, but 
came from Missouri via Santa Fe and Chiuhahua to 
Texas in 1826, a valuable man of enterprise and pub- 
Uc spirit and a true patriot. Of the commercial house 
of McKinney & Williams, at Velaseo, when the revo- 
lution broke out, they made great advances and 
pecuniary sacrifices for the cause. From 1837 to 
1849 they conducted a large house in Galveston, he 
serving in the first state senate, removed to Travis 
county in 1849, served in the legislature in 1857-58, 
invested largely in blooded stock, lost his fortune 
during the civil war and died in 1873, leaving a widow 
but no children. His memory is greatfully cherished 
by thousands all over Texas, who know of his honor- 
able and useful identification with the country, in all 
of its trials, during his forty-eight years residence 
in it. 

MuRPHREE, David, a brave, generous and accom- 
plished gentleman, came as a volunteer from Ran- 
dolph, Tennessee, in 1835, a lieutenent in Captain 
Peacock's company, which served at San Antonio. 
As first lieutenant he commanded a company at San 
Jacinto, settled as a merchant at Victoria and resided 
there till he was brutally murdered in 1866, while on 
business in Missouri. He served in many frontier 
expeditions and was a major in the Somervell expedi- 
tion in 1842. His only surviving child, James Owen 
Murphree, resides in DeWitt county. The other, 
Alexander, was killed in the battle of Mansfield. 

MuNSON, Mordello S., born in Texas in 1825, an 
able lawyer, a soldier in 1840-41 and 1842 and in 
the Confederate army. He has been a prominient 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



581 



and useful member of the legislature from Brazoria, 
his life-long home. 

Manchaca, Antonio, a noble Mexican born m 
Santonio in 1800. A Texas soldier at San Jacinto 
and in many frontier engagements, an ardent patriot 
and ever true to the Americans. He died at the 
age of eighty. 

Morgan, General George W., a native of Ohio, came 
to Texas in 1836 as captain of a company of young 
volunteers and served till the disbandment in 1837. 
He afterwards returned to Ohio, became an eminent 
lawyer, legislator, member of congress and a Union 
general in the late war. He resides at Mount Ver- 
.non, Ohio, and is held in high esteem in Texas. One 
of his youthful soldiers of 1836, Mr. Robert M. Wil- 
hams, died in Dallas about 1877. 

Moore, Colonel John H., resident in Fayette 
county, from 1826 to his death in 1881, fifty-five 
years ; a noted Indian fighter, often commanding 
expeditions, as in 1835, 1837, 1838, 1839 and in 
1840, invariably successful. Was colonel command- 
ing in the first skirmish at Gonzales, September 28, 
1835, and served at San Antonio immediately follow- 
ing. In October, 1840, he attacked and destroyed a 
Comanche village, near where the Texas and Pacific 
railroad now crosses the Colorado river, killing or 
capturing nearly all. In 1842 he commanded, as 
second in rank, in the pursuit of the Mexican Gen- 
eral Woll, beyond San Antonio. He was a giant in 
size, and ever esteemed a bold and sagacious leader ; 
but never held nor sought civil ofiice. 

Morgan, James, came from North Carolina to 
Texas, in colonial days, settled at Morgan's Point, 
head of Galveston bay — was a prominent and hon- 
orable man many years, of fine intelligence and 
talent ; held various responsible positions, and was a 
gentleman of the " old school." He became entirely 
bhnd a number of years before his death, but 
retained his hold on the popular heart till the last. 

Merriman, Francis H., a lawyer from Connecticut, 
came to Texas young, and long stood at the front at 
the bar of Galveston. He was often a member of 
the senate — one of nature's noblemen, a fine humor- 
ist, and, perhaps, more universally popular among 
acquaintances than any prominent man in the state. 
If he ever had an enemy the fact was unknown. 

Neill, General Andrew, a Scotchman by birth, 
came to Wellsburg, West Virginia, in his youth^ 
became a lawyer — went to Mississippi, where he was 
probate judge. In 1836 he came to Texas as captain 
of a company of volunteers, under General Felix 
Huston, arriving just after the battle of San Jacinto; 
but was at once placed on special duty and rendered 
valuable service till the disbandment of the army in 
1837. He then located as a lawyer, first at Gonzales 
and afterward at Seguin, where he resided from 1840 
till about 1866, when he licated in Galveston. Thence, 
about 1876, he removed to his present home in Aus- 
tin. General Neill was long identified with the strug- 
gles of the Southwesern pioneers, often in batde with 
the Indians and Mexicans, and always in the front 
when danger was at hand. He acted w-ith the 



greatest gallantry at Plum creek, August 12, 1840 ; at 
San Antonio, March 6, 1842, on the retreat of the 
Texians ; in most of the events of that year of raids 
and fights ; and in a bloody fight with the Indians in 
1843, was severely wounded. On the eleventh of Sep- 
tember, 1842, in San Antonio, with the judge, officers 
of the court and sundry lawyers and citizens, he was 
captured by the Me.xican general, Adrian Woll, and 
carried into Mexico. His escape was remarkable. 
On this side of the Mexican lakes, at dusk, he slipped 
from the guard, and, during the night, waded and 
swam some miles into the city, arriving at dawn. 
Secreting himself, he soon beheld an Irishman, Sulli- 
van by name, and a noble gentleman, to whom he 
made himself known. By that gentleman he was 
taken to his own house, cleanly shaven, newly clad 
and cared for. In due time, so complete was the dis- 
guise, he traveled to Vera Cruz in the same stage with 
the officer from whom he escaped, and duly reached 
home. He was commissioned brigadier-general by 
Governor Sam Houston, and resides in Austin, one of 
the honored survivors of 1836. General Neill mar- 
ried in 1844, Miss Agnes Brown, of Gonzales, a 
charming and accomplished lady, who died of yellow 
fever in Galveston, in 1867. He is blessed in a 
second union with Miss Jennie Chapman, a Virginia 
lady, beloved by a large circle of friends for those 
excellencies that adorn domestic and social life. 

Ogsbury, Charles A., with his twin brother, John 
J., came from New York, in the Morehouse battahon 
in 1835-6, leaving their father clandestinely. He had 
already seen commercial service in China and at sea, 
but was still a youth. Arriving on the field of San 
Jacinto the day after the batde, he served as a guard 
over Santa Anna, and the Mexican prisoners, and 
remained in the army till 1837. His twin brother died 
in the autumn of 1836. In 1839 he was in both the 
battles with the Cherokee Indians and wounded. In 
1840 he was in the batrie of Plum Creek, and served 
otherwise on the frontier. From 1849 to 1872 he 
was, alternately, merchant and editor of the Bulletin, 
omitting the period of the war, at Indianola. Since 
the latter date, till 1881, he edited the same paper at 
Cuero. During the late war he served chiefly on the 
Rio Grande. He is a generous, noble-hearted man, 
well versed in, and proud of, his connection with 
Texas history. 

Orr, Rev. Green, (whose twin brother. Washing- 
ton, was a well-known Methodist preacher in South- 
east Missouri), was a native of South Carolina, and a 
cousin of the late Governor James L. Orr. Of lim- 
ited education he early became a Methodist preacher 
in Arkansas and Northeast Texas. From 1848 till 
his death in 1863, he resided in Indianola, and died 
while the Federal army occupied that place. His 
zeal in good works, in a mixed population — his sym- 
pathy with the distressed — with his purity and sin- 
cerity of character, made him a power for good 
among all classes. By old and young, black and 
white, native and foreign born, he was affectionately 
styled Father Orr, and, though circumscribed in the 
field of his usefulness, reverence for his memory 



582 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



abides in every heart. He was one of the best men 
that ever honored Texas in her primitive days. 

PiLLSBURV, Captain Timothy, a sea captain from 
Maine, came to Brazoria in the days of the Republic; 
a stalwart man with a wife and ten children. The 
people, sugar planters, slave-holders and all, liked the 
old salt from Maine. They sent him repeatedly to the 
Texian congress; made him county judge, and, when 
annexation was accomplished, the people of West 
Texas elected him to the United States congress in 
1845 and again in 1847. He served four years, then 
moved to East Texas, where he died. One of his 
sons was the first mayor oi New Orleans after recon- 
struction, who stopped public plunder and protected 
the people against organized wrong. Texas honors 
the name of Pillsbury. 

Potter, Robert, a very talented man and brilliant 
orator, a native of North CaroHna, studied law, served 
two terms in congress from that state, and came to 
Texas before the revolution. He signed the declara- 
tion of independence, and served in the cabinet of 
President Burnet. In 1840 he was elected a senator 
from the Harrison or northeast district of the Repub- 
lic, and was a leading member during the succeeding 
session, but was killed, the result of a local feud, in 
1 841. Potter county is named in his honor. 

Potter, Henry N., a lawyer of Galveston and once 
a representative in the Texas congress, was a native 
of Connecticut, educated in the state of New York, 
and came to Galveston in 1838. He died just after 
the late war. 

Potter, Mark Milton, a brother of the last named, 
was born in New York, educated at Marion College, 
near Palmyra, Missouri, and came to Galveston in 
his twenty-first year in 1840. He was an able and 
distinguished lawyer — served in the legislature of 
1847-8, and from 1853 to his death during the war. 
was a member of the senate, one of the ablest, most 
laborious and upright men who ever sat in that body. 

Potter, Reuben M., a native of one of the Northern 
states, held several positions under the Republic of 
Texas, but is chiefly known as the author of the 
Hymn of the Alamo, and as a writer and poet. Being 
in Matamoros on the return of the Mexican army 
from Texas in 1836, he pubhshed in the Texas 
almanac of 1868 a graphic account of the siege and 
fall of the Alamo, embracing much data from Mexi- 
can sources, previously unknown in Texas — a valuable 
contribution to our history. He is believed to be 
living in New York. 

Placido, Captain, war chief of the Tancahua 
Indians ; from boyhood to death a brave and true 
friend of the whites ; a man of keen, native sense, 
and of inestimable service on the frontier from about 
1834 to his death, and that of most of his tribe, at the 
hands of the Comanches and Kiowas in Fort Cobb, 
Indian territory, during the late war. With more or 
less of his warriors he was in countless expeditions 
with the whites against the hostile tribes, and in many 
engagements, always displaying the most fearless 
courage. He long lived near the settlements of the 
Guadalupe, La Vaca and Colorado, and was ever 



ready to respond to the call of Burleson, Moore, 
Caldwell and other active leaders. Anecdotes innu- 
merable illustrate his sagacity, fidelity and courage. 
He was tall, slender and lithe, a graceful rider, indulg- 
ing always, unless in action, in dignified taciturity. 
In action his yell was eagle-like and his face aflame 
with fierce fury. His hatred of the Comanche, the 
immemorial enemy of his people, was intense, and for 
him he had no mercy. Men who sleep in their graves, 
if permitted to arise, could tell thousands of Texas- 
reared men and wT)men how their infantile lives, 
directly and indirectly, were preserved by the watch- 
fulness, the fidelity and the courage of this murdered 
son of the forest. 

Robertson, Colonel E. Sterling C, only son of 
Colonel Sterling C. Robertson, founder of Robertson's 
colony, came, when a boy twelve years of age, from 
Nashville, Tennessee, to Texas in 1832. His father 
had been educated in the Spanish language in Monte- 
rey. He rendered good service on the frontier; com- 
manded a company in the Somervell expedition of 
1842; filled various public positions, among them that 
of translator in the land office ; member of the seces- 
sion convention of i86i, and of the constitutional 
convention of 1875. He was, also, judge of Bell 
county, and brigadier-general of militia, by appoint- 
ment of Governor Houston, and a Mason of high 
rank — also a member of the Methodist church. He 
founded the beautiful town of Salado, in Bell county, 
and chiefly originated and built up the college of that 
place. He served in various capacities in the late 
war, though in infirm health during its progress. He 
inherited a large and valuable landed estate, and died 
at Salado in 1879, leaving an ample fortune to his 
widow and twelve children. 

Roman, Major Richard, a Kentuckian, came to 
Texas in the winter of 1835-6, as captain of a com- 
pany which he commanded in the battle of San 
Jacinto, after which he was promoted to be a major 
in the army. He was, also, elected to the first con- 
gress from Victoria, and until annexation was almost 
continuously in the senate or house, a wise and upright 
legislator as he was a man. He filled other import- 
ant trusts, was on the traveling board west of the 
Brazos, in 1840, to detect fraudulent land titles, and 
served, also, in the Federal (Revolutionary) army of 
Mexico, under Canales, in 1839. He was United 
States quartermaster in the Mexican war, and went 
to California in 1849. He fijled various offices in 
that state, as senator and state treasurer ; but of latter 
years was entirely deaf and lived in retirement. He 
died about 1877 or 1878. His memory in Texas is 
without blemish and fondly cherished by his surviving 
comrades. 

Sutherland, Captain George, (see Menefee), was 
one of the Alabama settlers that went on the Navidad 
in 1830 — a stalwart man of six feet four and weigh- 
ing nearly three hundred pounds, and married to 
Fanny, sister of Thomas and William Menefee. He 
was a captain before San Antonio in 1835, volunteered 
under Milam, to storm the place, and served untill the 
surrender. On the first day at San Jacinto, his horse 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



583 



was killed under him. On the next day he went in on 
foot, and displayed a courage which was universal — 
epidemic, so to speak — on that glorious day. He 
served in the congress of 1837, was a man of superior 
mind, but very limited education. He died in 1853. 
SuTHERL.^ND, William, a youthful son of Captain 
George, was a martyr of the Alamo — a promising 
boy, greatly beloved by the pioneers among whom his 
young life was given to his country and liberty. 

Sutherland, Mrs. Fanny, wife of Captain George 
and mother of William, known to us all in those 
primitive days, embodied all the excellencies of a true 
and patriotic farmer's wife, when danger lurked behind 
every tree. Beautiful and motherly, a fine house- 
keeper, pure as the snow of heaven, a thorough house- 
wife, and devoutly trusting in the God she served, 
she went to her grave honored and revered. 

Sylvester, Captain James A., a native of Balti- 
more and a printer. He came to Texas from Cin- 
cinnati, (really Covington, Kentucky, opposite Cin- 
cinnati), as a sergeant in a volunteer company, in the 
winter of 1836 ; was in the battle of San Jacinto, and, 
on the next day, April 22, 1836, captured and carried 
into camp Santa Anna. Four or five others were near 
by and w ent to him ; but to him primarily and essen- 
tially IS due the credit of the capture. He hastened 
back to Cincinnati, raised a company, and came back 
as its captain. He held various offices, and was in 
the Somervell expedition of 1842 to Mexico. In 
1843 he settled in New Orleans and yet resides there, 
though always considering himself a quasi Texian. 

Stewart, Dr. Charles B., an educated and high- 
toned gentleman from South Carolina, came to Texas 
about 1830, filled various otfices in the revolution, as 
secretary of the governor, etc.; signed the declaration 
of independence; served in the convention of 1845, 
in the first state legislature, and at different times 
since down to the session of 1874-5. ^^ '^ ^ '^^'^ 
of literary taste, vast intelligence, a fine wTiter and 
has been a valuable citizen for more than fifty years. 
He has long resided at Danville, Montgomery county. 
Stapp, Darwin M., came from Palmyra, Missouri, 
with his parents, five brothers and two sisters, in 
1830, settling on the La Vaca river. His father, 
Elijah Stapp, signed the declaration of independence, 
and died in 1842. His elder brother, William P., 
was a Mier prisoner, and pubUshed the volume called 
the Prisoners of Perote. His youngest brother, Wal- 
ter W., when a boy, served in the Somervell expedi- 
tion of 1842 ; was sent to Indiana and Kentucky in 
1843, and was there educated. He served in Mar- 
shall's Kentucky regiment in the Mexican war ; became 
associate editor of the Frankfort, Kentucky, Yeoman, 
and died of yellow fever in South America, while fill- 
ing the office of American consul. His brother, 
Oliver H., died of yellow fever at Bryan, in 1867. 
His brothers, Hugh S. and Archilles, and his sisters, 
(Mrs. Mary King and Mrs. Rebecca Steukes, of 
Southwest Texas), yet survive. His mother, a noble 
and loved woman, («<><■. Miss Shannon, of Kentucky), 
died in 1845. Darwin M. was a soldier in 1835-6 in 
the Grass fight and that of San Antonio ; under Rusk 



in 1836, at Plum creek in 1840, and on numerous 
frontier expeditions. He served in the legislature six 
years — 1849 to 1855 — and in the secession convention 
of 1 86 1, and was collector of customs for the district 
of Saluria or Matagorda bay. He was a man of fine, 
native mind, fair education and noble heart, and died 
at his home in Victoria about 1877, leaving an honor- 
able name to his posterity. 

Thurmond, Major Alfred S., a Georgian, came to 
Texas a volunteer in 1837 ; served often on the fron- 
tier, distinguished for courage and tenacity of pur- 
pose ; was in the battle of Salado, September 18, 
1842 ; pursued a party of Indians on the San Antonio 
river, who had murdered Mr. and Mrs. Gilleland and 
carried off their little son (William M. Gilleland, now 
of Austin), and daughter. Thurmond and party 
recaptured the children. He was in the Somervell 
expedition, and adhered to the organization under 
Colonel William S. Fisher, which fought and surren- 
dered at Mier. He became the interpreter for the 
prisoners, and was the only one allowed to witness the 
execution of the seventeen who drew black beans, and 
afterward of the yet baser murder of the heroic and 
stalwart Scot, Captain Ewen Cameron. When all but 
two beans were drawn, one was white, the other black, 
and these were to be drawn by Thurmond and James 
M. Ogden, a promising young lawyer, who had a 
widowed mother and dependent sisters at New Castle, 
Henry county, Kentucky. Thurmond, in keeping 
with his noble character, said : " Ogden, my people 
are well-to-do in Georgia. Your mother and sisters 
need your help ; feel well of the beans ; the black is 
slick, the white rough; draw it." Ogden replied: 
" No ; I dare not do so. I'll take the first my fingers 
touch." He did so and drew the last bean of death, 
and died as a resigned. Christian gentleman. Major 
Thurmond, after his release in 1844, served as sheriff 
of Victoria county ; in the Confederate army as cap- 
tain and major in New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana ; 
in the legislature of 1866 and 1873, then residing at 
Rockport, on Arkansas bay. On the eighth of January 
1876, with three families and others, he left Rockport, 
in a small vessell, for Tuxpan, Me.xico. A storm pre- 
vailed during the suceeeding night and day, and 
neither the vessel or passengers were ever heard of 
afterward. He left a widow, since deceased from a 
broken heart, and a little son, Dayton Thurmond, 
supposed to be in the care of his kindred. Notes of 
his eventful li^j, from his own pen, are in the hands of 
a lady in Dallas, known to him when she was a child, 
who, in due time, will prepare and pubhsh them. 

ToRREY, John F., David S., Thomas S.,and James, 
four brothers, from Ashford, Connecticut, came to 
Houston in 1836-7; saw much service on the Indian 
frontier; kept Torrey's trading house on the Tehua- 
cano, east of where Waco is. Thomas was one of 
the trio, with Joseph C. Eldridge and H. P. Bee, in 
the thrilling expedition of 1843, described in the 
memoir of General Bee. He died the same year 
pending a council with Indians, in connection with 
that expedition, on Village creek, now in Tarrant 
county. James, a noble and gallant young man, was 



584 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW WEST. 



one of the seventeen decimated Mier prisoners in the 
same year. David S. was killed by the Indians in 
1850. In later years John F. built and owned woolen 
mills at New Braunfels, attended with great prosperity 
till dual floods swept away his possessions. He now 
resides on his farm, covering Comanche Peak, in 
Hood county. There were other brothers, unknown 
to the writer. All were honorable and useful men. 

Usher, Patrick, came from North Carolina, . a 
young man and lawyer, to what became Jackson 
county, in 1834. He was a man of fine mind and 
spotless character. He was the first revolutionary 
judge of his county; a splendid soldier ; again judge 
for several years ; twice a member of congress in 1840 
and 1841, and, in 1842, volunteered in the Somervell 
expedition to Mexico, which resulted in the sanguinary 
battle of Mier, where he and his comrades became 
prisoners. In the barbarous bean drawing, at the 
hacienda of Salado, in the state of San Luis, Patosi, 
he drew a white bean and escaped slaughter, but died 
during the next year, as a Mier prisoner, in the castle 
of Perote. He never married nor had a relative in 
Texas, but his memory and noble character are 
cherished by all who knew him. 

Van Ness, Cornelius, a native of Vermont, whose 
father, William P. Van Ness, was governor of that 
state ; a member of congress and United States min- 
ister to Spain, Cornelius being the secretary of lega- 
tion, where he became a Spanish scholar. He came 
to San Antonio, Texas, in 1836, and was a member 
of congress in 1 837-8-9-40-41 and 1842 ; but was 
accidently killed in the spring of the latter year by 
the discharge of a gun hung to the pommel of a sad- 
dle on a "pitching" horse, in the streets of San 
Antonio. He was an able lawyer, a towering orator 
and a patriot of the highest type, and his death was 
deplored as a great loss to the country. He was 
about thirty, and seemed to have as brilHant a future 
as any young man in Texas. 

Van Ness, George, a younger brother of Cornelius, 
an adventurous young man of commercial pursuits, a 
prisoner in the ill-fated Santa Fe expedition. 
Released, he was a soldier in the autumn of the 
same year, (1842), and afterwards in the Mexican 
war. Unambitious, he was a private citizen and a 
private soldier, loved by his fellows for his intelli- 
gence, his courage and his noble heart. [These two 
Green mountain boys, honored all over Texas, were 
supplemented from the same state in the persons of 
young Temple, son of an ex-member of congress from 
Vermont, who fought with us in 1842, and the 
lamented James Denison, first of Matagorda and last 
of San Antonio, besides Judge Joel Miner, deceased, 
of Austin, Rev. Caleb S. Ives, of Matagorda, and 
David Ives, his brother, a surveyor of Lavaca county, 
besides Martin Carroll Wing, elsewhere mentioned in 
alphabetical order.] 

Witt, Captain Preston, (twin brother to Presley), 
with several brothers, came to Dallas county, from 
Green county, Illinois, in 1843-44. He commanded 
a company from Dallas and surrrounding counties in 
Hay^s' 2d regiment in the Mexican war, serving 



between Vera Cruz and the City of Mexico, and was 
in numerous engagements. In pursuit of a band of 
Indians from Dallas county, in what is now Wise 
county, he had a hand to hand fight with a powerful 
chief and slew him with his Bowie knife. He was a 
peaceable and every way worthy citizen and died in 
Dallas county in 1877. 

Wharton, William H. and John A., young law- 
yers of splendid talents and devoted brothers, came 
from Tennessee to Texas about 1825-26. William 
H. married Sarah A., the only daughter of Mr. Jared 
W. Groce, a planter on the Brazos, about 1827. On 
a visit to Nashville, Tennessee, their only child was 
born in that place. The child, John A. Wharton, jr., 
grew to manhood, was educated at the University of 
South Carolina, married a daughter of Governor 
Johnson of that state, and became by promotinos from 
a captaincy, a major-general in the Confederate army, 
to die at the close of the war by an unfortunate col- 
lision, deplored by the people and thousands of 
mutual friends. William H. Wharton was an orator 
of the style of William C. Preston. He was in the 
battle of Velasco in 1832, president of the provincial 
convention in 1833, a member of congress at the 
sessions of 1836-39, lamented as one of the most bril- 
liant stars in the galaxy that shed lustre on Texas in 
that era of intellectual giants and spotless patriots. 
The name, in lineage, is extinct, neither brother having 
a descendant to transmit it ; but it is emblazoned on 
the pages of our history and perpetuated in the name 
of Wharton county, bestowed in their joint memory. 
The widow and only child of General John A. Whar- 
ton, the Confederate, both died since the war, leaving 
the name in Texas, as stated, extinct. A zealous advo- 
cate of war m 1835, with Austin and Archer a com- 
missioner to the United State in 1836, a senator in 
the first congress, first minister to the United States, 
and died by the accidental discharge of his own pis- 
tol while a member of the senate in 1839. John A. 
Wharton, who never married, was an orator of a dif- 
ferent style, dealing in burning eloquence, sharpened 
by incisive sarcasm. He served in the army in 1835 
and 1836, and was adjutant-general at San Jacinto, a 
Harry Hotspur in action, his clarion voice calling upon 
others to follow and his flaming face bidding his com- 
rades on to glory. He represented the people in 
the consultation of 1835, signed the declaration of 
independence, served in congress and died in 1838. 

Wing, Martin Carroll, a native and printer of Ver- 
mont, as brave and generous a man as ever should- 
ered a musket for Texas, came from New York in the 
Morehouse expedition in the winter of 1835-36, in 
the same brig with the (now) distinguished General 
William H. Loring, first of the Texian, next of 
the United States, then of the Confederate and lastly 
of the Egyptian army, ex-Governor Peter H. Bell, 
Colonel Charles de Morse, Charles A. Ogsbury, (and 
his deceased brother, John J. Ogsbury, who died in 
1836 a Texas boy soldier), the deceased Judge James 
C. .'VUan, Louis P. Cooke, afterwards secretary of the 
Texian navy, and others who became distinguished. 
They were imprisoned in the West Indies as pirates. 



IBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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